THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

.THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

RIVERSIDE 


PARTS  OF  SPEECH 

ESSAYS  ON  ENGLISH 


"Books  by  Grander  {Matthews : 

ESSAYS  AND  CRITICISMS 
French  Dramatists  of  the  I9th  Century 
Pen  and  Ink,  Essays  on  subjects  of  more 

or  less  importance 
Aspects  of  Fiction,  and  other  Essays 
The  Historical  Novel,  and  other  Essays 
Parts  of  Speech,  Essays  on  English 
The   Development   of  the   Drama   (in 

preparation) 


PARTS  OF  SPEECH 

»•'•— 

ESSAYS  ON  ENGLISH 


BY 


BRANDER  MATTHEWS 

PROFESSOR   IN   COLUMBIA  UNIVERSITY 


NEW   YORK 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 
1901 


Copyright,  1901,  by 
BRANDER  MATTHEWS 


Published  September,  1901 


THE  CAXTON  PRESS 
NEW  YORK. 


TO  MY  FRIEND  AND  COLLEAGUE 

GEORGE  RICE  CARPENTER 

PROFESSOR  OF  RHETORIC  AND  ENGLISH  COMPOSITION 
IN  COLUMBIA  UNIVERSITY 


PREFATORY  NOTE 

A/THO  the  various  essays  which  are  now 
brought  together  in  this  book  have  been 
written  from  time  to  time  during  the  past  ten 
years,  nearly  all  of  them  have  had  their  origin  in 
a  desire  to  make  plain  and  to  emphasize  one 
fact:  that  the  English  language  belongs  to  the 
peoples  who  speak  it— that  it  is  their  own  pre- 
cious possession,  to  deal  with  at  their  pleasure 
and  at  their  peril.  The  fact  itself  ought  to  be 
obvious  enough  to  all  of  us;  and  yet  there  would 
be  no  difficulty  in  showing  that  it  is  not  every- 
where accepted.  Perhaps  the  best  way  to  pre- 
sent it  so  clearly  that  it  cannot  be  rejected  is  to 
draw  attention  to  some  of  its  implications;  and 
this  is  what  has  been  attempted  in  one  or  another 
of  these  separate  papers. 

The  point  of  view  from  which  the  English  lan- 
guage has  been  approached  is  that  of  the  man  of 
letters  rather  than  that  of  the  professed  expert  in 
linguistics.  But  the  writer  ventures  to  hope  that 
the  professed  expert,  even  tho  he  discovers  little 


PREFATORY   NOTE 

that  is  new  in  these  pages,  will  find  also  little 
that  demands  his  disapproval.  The  final  essay 
is  frankly  more  literary  than  linguistic,  for  it  is 
an  attempt  to  define  not  so  much  a  word  as  a 
thing. 

So  wise  a  critic  of  literature  and  of  language  as 
Sainte-Beuve  has  declared  that  "  orthography  is 
like  society:  it  will  never  be  entirely  reformed; 
but  we  can  at  least  make  it  less  vicious."  In  this 
sensible  saying  is  the  warrant  for  the  simplified 
spellings  adopted  in  the  following  pages.  As 
will  be  seen  by  readers  of  the  two  papers  on  our 
orthography,  the  writer  is  by  no  means  a  radical 
"spelling-reformer,"  so  called.  But  he  believes 
that  all  of  us  who  wish  to  keep  the  English  lan- 
guage up  to  its  topmost  efficiency  are  bound  al- 
ways to  do  all  in  our  power  to  aid  the  tendency 
toward  simplification— whether  of  orthography 
or  of  syntax— which  has  been  at  work  unceas- 
ingly ever  since  the  language  came  into  existence. 

B.  M. 

COLUMBIA  UNIVERSITY, 
July  4,  1901. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I  The  Stock  that  Speaks  the  Language     .      3 

II  The  Future  of  the  Language  .     ...     29 

III  The  English  Language  in  the  United 

States 47 

IV  The  Language  in  Great  Britain  .     .     .     81 
V  Americanisms  Once  More 97 

VI  New  Words  and  Old 127 

VII  The  Naturalisation  of  Foreign  Words  .   165 

VIII   The  Function  of  Slang 187 

IX  Questions  of  Usage 217 

X  An  Inquiry  as  to  Rime 241 

XI  On  the  Poetry  of  Place-Names    .     .     .271 

XII  As  to  "American  Spelling"   ....  295 

XIII  The  Simplification  of  English  Spelling  319 

XIV  Americanism  —  An  Attempt  at  a  Defini- 

tion   343 


I 

THE  STOCK  THAT  SPEAKS 
THE  LANGUAGE 


THE  STOCK  THAT  SPEAKS 
THE   LANGUAGE 

IT  is  a  thousand  years  since  the  death  of 
the  great  Englishman,  King  Alfred,  in  whose 
humble  translations  we  may  see  the  beginnings 
of  English  literature.  Until  it  has  a  literature, 
however  unpretending  and  however  artless,  a 
language  is  not  conscious  of  itself;  and  it  is  there- 
fore in  no  condition  to  maintain  its  supremacy 
over  the  dialects  that  are  its  jealous  rivals.  And 
it  is  by  its  literature  chiefly  that  a  language  for- 
ever binds  together  the  peoples  who  speak  it— by 
a  literature  in  which  the  characteristics  of  these 
peoples  are  revealed  and  preserved,  and  in  which 
their  ideals  are  declared  and  passed  down  from 
generation  to  generation  as  the  most  precious 
heritage  of  the  race. 

The  historian  of  the  English  people  asserts  that 
what  made  Alfred  great,  small  as  was  his  sphere 
of  action,  was  "the  moral  grandeur  of  his  life. 
He  lived  solely  for  the  good  of  his  people."  He 
laid  the  foundations  for  a  uniform  system  of  law, 
3 


THE  STOCK  THAT  SPEAKS  THE   LANGUAGE 

and  he  started  schools,  wishing  that  every  free- 
born  youth  who  had  the  means  should  "  abide  at 
his  book  till  he  can  understand  English  writing." 
He  invited  scholars  from  other  lands  to  settle  in 
England;  but  what  most  told  on  English  culture 
was  done  not  by  them  but  by  the  king  himself. 
He  "  resolved  to  throw  open  to  his  people  in  their 
own  tongue  the  knowledge  which  till  then  had 
been  limited  to  the  clergy,"  and  he  "took  his 
books  as  he  found  them,"  the  popular  manuals 
of  the  day,  Bede  and  Boethius  and  Orosius. 
These  he  translated  with  his  own  hand,  editing 
freely,  and  expanding  and  contracting  as  he  saw 
fit.  "  Do  not  blame  me  if  any  know  Latin  better 
than  I,"  he  explained  with  modest  dignity;  "for 
every  man  must  say  what  he  says  and  must  do 
what  he  does  according  to  his  ability."  And 
Green,  from  whom  this  quotation  is  borrowed, 
insists  that,  "simple  as  was  his  aim,  Alfred  created 
English  literature"— the  English  literature  which 
is  still  alive  and  sturdy  after  a  thousand  years,  and 
which  is  to-day  flourishing  not  only  in  Great 
Britain,  where  Alfred  founded  it,  but  here  in  the 
United  States,  in  a  larger  land,  the  existence  of 
which  the  good  king  had  no  reason  ever  to  sur- 
mise. 

This  English  literature  is  like  the  language  in 
which  it  is  written,  and  also  like  the  stock  that 
speaks  the  language,  wherever  the  race  may  have 
4 


THE   STOCK   THAT  SPEAKS   THE   LANGUAGE 

planted  or  transplanted  itself,  whether  by  the 
banks  of  the  little  Thames  or  on  the  shores  of  the 
broad  Hudson  and  the  mighty  Mississippi.  Lit- 
erature and  language  and  people  are  practical,  no 
doubt;  but  they  are  not  what  they  are  often 
called:  they  are  not  prosaic.  On  the  contrary, 
they  are  poetic,  essentially  and  indisputably 
poetic.  The  peoples  that  speak  English  are,  and 
always  have  been,  self-willed  and  adventurous. 
This  they  were  long  before  King  Alfred's  time, 
in  the  early  days  when  they  were  Teutons  merely, 
and  had  not  yet  won  their  way  into  Britain; 
and  this  they  are  to-day,  when  the  most  of  them 
no  longer  dwell  in  old  England,  but  in  the  newer 
England  here  in  America.  They  have  ever  lacked 
the  restraint  and  reserve  which  are  the  conditions 
of  the  best  prose;  and  they  have  always  exulted 
in  the  untiring  energy  and  the  daring  imagination 
which  are  the  vital  elements  of  poetry.  "  In  his 
busiest  days  Alfred  found  time  to  learn  the  old 
songs  of  his  race  by  heart,"  so  the  historian  tells 
us;  "and  he  bade  them  be  taught  in  the  palace- 
school." 

Lyric  is  what  English  literature  has  always 
been  at  its  best,  lyric  and  dramatic;  and  the 
men  who  speak  English  have  always  been  indi- 
vidual and  independent,  every  man  ready  to  fight 
for  his  own  hand;  and  the  English  language 
has  gone  on  its  own  way,  keeping  its  strength  in 

5 


THE  STOCK   THAT    SPEAKS   THE   LANGUAGE 

spite  of  the  efforts  of  pedants  and  pedagogs  to 
bind  it  and  to  stifle  it,  and  ever  insisting  on  re- 
newing its  freshness  as  best  it  could.  Develop- 
ment there  has  been  in  language  and  in  literature 
and  in  the  stock  itself,  development  and  growth 
of  many  kinds ;  but  no  radical  change  can  be  de- 
tected in  all  these  ten  centuries.  "  No  national 
art  is  good  which  is  not  plainly  the  nation's  own," 
said  Mr.  Stopford  Brooke  in  his  consideration  of 
the  earliest  English  lyrics.  "  The  poetry  of  Eng- 
land has  owed  much  to  the  different  races  which 
mingled  with  the  original  English  race;  it  has 
owed  much  to  the  different  types  of  poetry  it 
absorbed— Greek,  Latin,  Welsh,  French,  Italian, 
Spanish:  but  below  all  these  admixtures  the 
English  nature  wrought  its  steady  will.  It 
seized,  it  transmuted,  it  modified,  it  mastered 
these  admixtures  both  of  races  and  of  song." 

The  English  nature  wrought  its  steady  will; 
but  what  is  this  English  nature,  thus  set  up  as  an 
entity  and  endowed  with  conscious  purpose  ?  Is 
there  such  a  thing,  of  a  certainty  ?  Can  there  be 
such  a  thing,  indeed  ?  These  questions  are  easier 
to  ask  than  to  answer.  It  is  true  that  we  have 
been  accustomed  to  credit  certain  races  not  merely 
with  certain  characteristics,  but  even  with  certain 
qualities,  esteeming  certain  peoples  to  be  spe- 
cially gifted  in  one  way  or  another.  For  example, 
we  have  held  it  as  an  article  of  faith  that  the. 
6 


THE   STOCK   THAT   SPEAKS   THE    LANGUAGE 

Greeks,  by  their  display  of  a  surpassing  sense  of 
form,  proved  their  possession  of  an  artistic  capa- 
city finer  and  richer  than  that  revealed  by  any 
other  people  since  the  dawn  of  civilization.  And 
again,  we  have  seen  in  the  Roman  skill  in  con- 
structive administration,  in  the  Latin  success  in 
law-making  and  in  road-building— we  have  seen 
in  this  the  evidence  of  a  native  faculty  denied  to 
their  remote  predecessors,  the  Egyptians.  Now 
come  the  advocates  of  a  later  theory,  who  tell  us 
that  the  characteristics  of  the  Greeks  and  of  the 
Romans  are  not  the  result  of  any  inherent  su- 
periority of  theirs,  or  of  any  native  predisposition 
toward  art  or  toward  administration,  but  are 
caused  rather  by  circumstances  of  climate,  of  geo- 
graphical situation,  and  of  historical  position. 
We  are  assured  now  that  the  Romans,  had  they 
been  in  the  place  of  the  Greeks  and  under  like 
circumstances,  might  have  revealed  themselves 
as  great  masters  of  form ;  while  the  Greeks,  had 
their  history  been  that  of  the  Romans,  would 
certainly  have  shown  the  same  power  of  ruling 
themselves  and  others,  and  of  compacting  the 
most  diverse  nations  into  a  single  empire. 

No  doubt  the  theory  of  race-characteristics,  of 
stocks  variously  gifted  with  specific  faculties, 
has  been  too  vigorously  asserted  and  unduly  in- 
sisted upon.  It  was  so  convenient  and  so  useful 
that  it  could  not  help  being  overworked.  But 
7 


THE   STOCK   THAT  SPEAKS   THE   LANGUAGE 

altho  it  is  not  so  impregnable  as  it  was  sup- 
posed to  be,  it  need  not  be  surrendered  at  the 
first  attack;  and  altho  we  are  compelled  to 
abandon  the  theory  as  a  whole,  we  can  save 
what  it  contained  of  truth.  And  therefore  it  is 
well  to  bear  in  mind  that  even  if  the  Greeks  in 
the  beginning  had  no  sharper  bent  toward  art 
than  had  the  Phenicians,  — from  whom  they  bor- 
rowed so  much  of  value  to  be  made  by  them 
more  valuable,— even  if  their  esthetic  superiority 
was  the  result  of  a  happy  chapter  of  chances,  it 
was  a  fact  nevertheless ;  and  a  time  came  at  last 
when  the  Greeks  were  seen  to  be  possessed  of  a 
fertility  of  invention  and  of  a  sense  of  form  sur- 
passing all  their  predecessors  had  ever  exhibited. 
When  this  time  came  the  Greeks  were  conscious 
of  their  unexampled  achievements  and  properly 
proud  of  them ;  and  they  proved  that  they  were 
able  to  transmit  from  sire  to  son  this  artistic 
aptitude— however  the  aptitude  itself  had  been 
developed  originally.  So  whether  the  Roman 
power  to  govern  and  to  evolve  the  proper  instru- 
ments of  government  was  a  native  gift  of  the 
Latins,  or  whether  it  was  developed  in  them  by 
a  fortuitous  combination  of  geographical  and  his- 
torical circumstances,  this  question  is  somewhat 
academic,  since  we  know  that  the  Romans  did 
display  extraordinary  administrative  ability  cen- 
tury after  century.  Whenever  it  was  evolved, 
8 


THE  STOCK    THAT  SPEAKS   THE   LANGUAGE 

the  artistic  type  in  Greece  and  the  administrative 
type  in  Italy  was  persistent;  and  it  reappeared 
again  and  again  in  successive  generations. 

This  indeed  needs  always  to  be  remembered, 
that  race-characteristics,  whatever  their  origin, 
are  strangely  enduring  when  once  they  are  estab- 
lished. The  English  nature  whereof  Mr.  Stop- 
ford  Brooke  speaks,  when  once  it  was  conscious 
of  itself,  worked  its  steady  will,  despite  the 
changes  of  circumstance;  and  only  very  slowly 
is  it  modified  by  the  accidents  of  later  history  and 
geography.  M.  Fouillee  has  set  side  by  side  the 
description  of  the  Germans  by  Tacitus  and  the 
account  of  the  Gauls  by  Caesar,  drawing  attention 
to  the  fact  that  the  modern  French  are  now  very 
like  the  ancient  Gauls,  and  that  the  descendants 
of  the  Germans  of  old,  the  various  branches  of 
the  Teutonic  race,  have  the  characteristics  of  their 
remote  ancestors  whom  the  Roman  historian 
chose  to  praise  by  way  of  warning  for  his  fellow- 
citizens. 

The  Romans  conquered  Gaul  and  held  it  for 
centuries;  the  Franks  took  it  in  turn  and  gave  it 
their  name;  but  the  Gallic  type  was  so  securely 
fixed  that  the  Roman  first  and  then  the  Frank 
succumbed  to  it  and  were  absorbed  into  it.  The 
Gallic  type  is  not  now  absolutely  unchanged,  for, 
after  all,  the  world  does  move;  but  it  is  readily 
recognizable  to  this  day.  Certain  of  Caesar's 
9 


THE   STOCK   THAT   SPEAKS  THE   LANGUAGE 

criticisms  read  as  tho  they  were  written  by  a 
contemporary  of  Napoleon.  As  Caesar  saw  them 
the  Gauls  were  fickle  in  counsel  and  fond  of  re- 
volutions. Believing  in  false  rumors,  they  were 
led  into  deeds  they  regretted  afterward.  Decid- 
ing questions  of  importance  without  reflection, 
they  were  ready  to  war  without  reason ;  and  they 
were  weak  and  lacking  in  energy  in  time  of  dis- 
aster. They  were  cast  down  by  a  first  defeat,  as 
they  were  inflamed  by  a  first  victory.  They  were 
affable,  light,  inconstant,  and  vain;  they  were 
quick-witted  and  ready-tongued ;  they  had  a  lik- 
ing for  tales  and  an  insatiable  curiosity  for  news. 
They  cultivated  eloquence,  having  an  astonishing 
facility  of  speech,  and  of  letting  themselves  be 
taken  in  by  words.  And  having  thus  summed 
up  Caesar's  analysis  of  the  Gaul,  M.  Fouillee  asks 
how  after  this  we  can  deny  the  persistence  of 
national  types. 

What  Tacitus  has  to  say  of  the  Germans  comes 
home  more  closely  to  us  who  speak  English,  since 
the  Teutonic  tribes  the  Latin  historian  was  con- 
sidering are  not  more  the  ancestors  of  the  modern 
Prussians  than  they  are  of  the  wide-spread  Anglo- 
Saxon  peoples.  As  those  who  speak  English 
went  from  the  mainland  across  the  North  Sea  to 
an  island  and  dwelt  there  for  centuries,  and  were 
joined  by  earlier  kin  from  elsewhere,  the  race- 
characteristics  were  obviously  modified  a  little— 


THE   STOCK   THAT   SPEAKS   THE   LANGUAGE 

just  as  they  have  been  as  obviously  modified  a 
little  more  when  some  of  those  who  spoke  Eng- 
lish went  out  again  from  the  island  to  a  boundless 
continent  across  the  Atlantic,  and  were  joined 
here  by  many  others,  most  of  whom  were  also 
derived  from  one  or  another  of  the  varied  Teu- 
tonic stocks. 

It  is  nearly  two  thousand  years  since  Tacitus 
studied  the  Teutonic  race-characteristics,  and  yet 
most  of  the  peculiarities  he  noted  then  are  evident 
now.  Tacitus  tells  us  that  the  Teutons  were 
tall,  fair-haired,  and  flegmatic.  They  were  great 
eaters,  not  to  say  gross  feeders;  and  they  were 
given  to  strong  drink.  They  were  fond  of  games, 
and  were  ready  to  pay  their  losses  with  their 
persons,  if  need  be.  They  were  individual  and 
independent.  Their  manners  were  rude,  not  to 
call  them  violent.  They  were  possessed  of  the 
domestic  virtues,  the  women  being  chaste  and 
the  husbands  faithful.  They  loved  war  as  they 
loved  liberty.  They  had  a  passionate  fidelity  to 
their  leaders.  They  decided  important  questions 
of  policy  in  public  assembly. 

The  several  peoples  of  our  own  time  who  are 
descended  from  the  Teutons  thus  described  by 
Tacitus  with  so  sympathetic  an  insight  have 
been  developing  for  twenty  centuries,  more  or 
less,  each  in  its  own  way,  under  influences 
wholly  unlike,  influences  both  geographical  and 


THE  STOCK   THAT  SPEAKS   THE   LANGUAGE 

historical;  and  it  is  small  wonder  that  they  have 
diverged  as  they  have,  and  that  no  one  of  them 
nowadays  completely  represents  the  original 
stock.  Some  of  the  points  Tacitus  made  are  true 
to-day  in  Prussia  and  are  not  true  in  Great  Britain ; 
and  some  hit  home  here  in  the  United  States, 
altho  they  miss  the  mark  in  Germany.  The 
modern  Germans  still  retain  a  few  of  these  Taci- 
tean  characteristics  which  the  peoples  that  speak 
English  have  lost  in  their  adventurous  career  over- 
seas. And  on  the  other  hand,  certain  of  the 
remarks  of  Tacitus  might  be  made  to-day  in  the 
United  States;  for  example,  the  willingness  to 
run  risks  for  the  fun  of  the  game— is  not  this  a 
present  characteristic  of  the  American  as  we 
know  him  ?  And  here  we  have  always  been 
governed  by  town-meeting,  as  the  old  Teutons 
were,  whereas  the  modern  German  is  only  now 
getting  this  back  by  borrowing  it  from  the 
English  precedent.  In  our  private  litigations 
we  continue  to  abide  by  the  customs  of  our 
remote  Teutonic  ancestors,  while  the  German 
has  accepted  as  a  legal  guide  the  Roman  law, 
wrought  out  by  the  countrymen  of  Tacitus. 

Second  only  to  a  community  of  language,  no 
unifying  force  is  more  potent  than  a  community 
of  law.  In  the  depths  of  their  dark  forests  the 
Teutons  had  already  evolved  their  own  rudi- 
mentary code  by  which  they  did  justice  between 


THE  STOCK   THAT  SPEAKS   THE   LANGUAGE 

man  and  man;  and  these  customary  sanctions 
were  taken  over  to  Britain  by  the  Angles  and 
the  Saxons  and  the  Jutes;  and  they  served  as 
the  foundation  of  the  common  law  by  means  of 
which  the  peoples  that  speak  English  still  ad- 
minister justice  in  their  courts.  And  here  again 
we  find  the  handiwork  of  the  great  King  Alfred, 
from  whom  we  may  date  the  codification  of  an 
English  law  as  we  may  also  reckon  the  establish- 
ing of  an  English  literature.  With  the  opportu- 
nism of  our  race,  he  had  no  thought  of  a  new 
legislation,  but  merely  merged  the  best  of  the 
tribal  customs  into  a  law  for  the  whole  kingdom. 
The  king  sought  to  bring  to  light  and  to  leave  on 
record  the  righteous  rulings  of  the  wise  men  who 
had  gone  before.  "  Those  things  which  I  met 
with,"  so  the  historian  transmits  his  words, 
"  either  of  the  days  of  Ine,  my  kinsman,  or  of 
Offa,  King  of  the  Mercians,  or  of  /Ethelberht, 
who  first  among  the  English  race  received  bap- 
tism, those  which  seemed  to  me  rightest,  those 
I  have  gathered,  and  rejected  the  rest." 

Law  and  language— these  are  the  unrelaxing 
bands  that  hold  a  race  firmly  together.  There 
are  now  two  main  divisions  of  the  Teutonic 
stock,  separated  to-day  by  language  and  by  law 
—the  people  who  speak  German  and  are  ruled 
by  Roman  law,  and  the  peoples  who  speak  Eng- 
lish and  are  governed  by  the  common  law;  and 
'3 


THE  STOCK   THAT   SPEAKS   THE   LANGUAGE 

the  separation  is  as  wide  and  as  deep  legally  as 
it  is  linguistically.  "  By  the  forms  of  its  language 
a  nation  expresses  its  very  self,"  said  one  of  the 
acutest  of  British  critics;  and  we  have  the  proof 
of  this  at  hand  in  the  characteristic  differences 
between  the  English  language  and  the  German. 
By  the  forms  of  its  law  a  people  expresses  its  po- 
litical beliefs ;  and  we  have  the  evidence  of  this  in 
the  fact  that  we  Americans  regard  our  rulers 
merely  as  agents  of  the  town-meeting  of  the  old 
Teutons,  while  the  modern  Germans  are  submit- 
ting to  a  series  of  trials  for  lese-majesty. 

Laws  have  most  weight  when  they  are  seen  to 
be  the  expression  of  the  common  conscience; 
and  they  are  most  respected  when  they  best 
reflect  the  ideals  that  are  "  the  souls  of  the  nations 
which  cherish  them,"  as  a  historian  of  American 
literature  has  finely  phrased  it—"  the  living  spirits 
which  waken  nationality  into  being,  and  which 
often  preserve  its  memory  long  after  its  life  has 
ebbed  away."  The  marked  difference  now  ob- 
vious between  the  two  great  divisions  of  the 
Teutonic  stock— that  which  speaks  English  and 
that  which  speaks  German— is  due  in  part  to  their 
not  having  each  conserved  exactly  the  same  por- 
tion of  the  ideals  inherited  from  their  common 
ancestors,  and  in  part  to  their  having  each  ac- 
quired other  ideals  in  the  course  of  the  many 
centuries  of  their  separate  existence.  And  the 
«4 


THE  STOCK   THAT   SPEAKS   THE    LANGUAGE 

minor  differences  to  be  detected  between  the 
two  great  divisions  of  the  stock  that  speaks  Eng- 
lish, that  dwelling  in  Great  Britain  and  that 
dwelling  in  the  United  States,  are  due  to  similar 
causes. 

While  the  ancestors  of  the  people  who  speak 
German  were  abiding  at  home,  where  Tacitus  had 
seen  them,  the  ancestors  of  the  peoples  who 
speak  English  went  forth  across  the  North  Sea 
and  possessed  themselves  of  the  better  part  of 
Great  Britain  and  gave  it  a  new  name.  They 
were  not  content  to  defeat  the  earlier  inhabitants 
in  fair  fight,  and  then  to  leave  them  in  peace,  as 
the  Romans  did,  ruling  them  and  intermarrying 
with  them;  the  English  thrust  the  natives  out 
violently  and  harried  them  away.  As  Green 
puts  it  tersely,  "  The  English  conquest  for  a  hun- 
dred and  fifty  years  was  a  sheer  dispossession 
and  driving  back  of  the  people  whom  the  Eng- 
lish conquered."  No  doubt  this  dispossession 
was  ruthless ;  but  was  it  complete  ?  The  new- 
comers took  the  land  for  their  own,  and  they 
meant  to  kill  out  all  the  original  owners;  but 
was  this  possible?  The  country  was  rough  and 
thickly  wooded,  and  it  abounded  in  nooks  and 
corners  where  a  family  might  hide  itself.  More- 
over, what  is  more  likely  than  that  the  invader 
should  often  spare  a  woman  and  take  her  to 
wife?  For  centuries  the  English  kept  spreading 

'5 


THE  STOCK   THAT  SPEAKS  THE   LANGUAGE 

themselves  and  pushing  back  the  Britons;  but 
in  the  long  war  there  were  truces  now  and 
again,  and  what  is  more  likely  than  an  incessant 
intermingling  of  the  blood  all  along  the  border 
as  it  was  slowly  driven  forward  ? 

Certain  it  is  that  one  of  the  influences  which 
have  modified  the  modern  English  stock  is  a 
Celtic  strain.  If  the  peoples  that  speak  English 
are  now  not  quite  like  the  people  that  speak  Ger- 
man, plainly  this  is  one  reason :  they  have  had  a 
Celtic  admixture,  which  has  lightened  them  and 
contributed  elements  lacking  in  the  original 
Teuton.  To  declare  just  what  these  elements 
are  is  not  easy;  but  to  deny  their  presence  is 
impossible.  The  Celt  has  an  impetuosity  and  a 
swiftness  of  perception  which  we  do  not  find  in 
the  original  Teuton,  and  which  the  man  who 
speaks  English  is  now  more  likely  to  possess 
than  the  man  who  speaks  German.  The  Celt 
has  a  certain  shy  delicacy;  he  has  a  happy  sensi- 
bility and  a  turn  for  charming  sentiment;  he  has 
a  delightful  lyric  note ;  and  he  has  at  times  a  sin- 
cere and  puissant  melancholy.  These  are  all 
qualities  which  we  find  in  our  English  literature, 
and  especially  in  its  greatest  figure.  "  The  Celts 
do  not  form  an  utterly  distinct  part  of  our  mixed 
population,"  said  Henry  Morley  in  a  striking  pas- 
sage. "  But  for  early,  frequent,  and  various  con- 
tact with  the  race  that  in  its  half-barbarous  days 
16 


THE  STOCK  THAT  SPEAKS  THE  LANGUAGE 

invented  Ossian's  dialogues  with  St.  Patrick,  and 
that  quickened  afterward  the  Northmen's  blood 
in  France,  Germanic  England  would  not  have 
produced  a  Shakspere." 

Here  we  see  Morley  declaring  that  the  Celt  had 
"quickened  the  Northmen's  blood  in  France"; 
and  perhaps  by  his  choice  of  a  word  he  meant  to 
remind  us  that  whereas  the  Northmen  who  sailed 
down  the  mouth  of  the  Seine  were  Teutons,  the 
Normans  who  were  to  sail  up  to  Hastings  had 
been  materially  modified  during  their  sojourn  in 
France,  which  had  once  been  Celtic  Gaul.  Two 
series  of  occasions  there  were  when  the  English 
received  an  accession  of  Celtic  blood:  first, 
when  they  conquered  England;  and  second, 
when  they  in  turn  were  conquered  by  the  Nor- 
mans, who  ruled  them  for  centuries,  and  were 
finally  merged  in  them,  just  as  earlier  the  Romans 
had  been  merged  in  the  Gauls.  And  this  recalls 
to  us  the  fact  that  there  was  more  in  the  Norman 
than  the  intermingling  of  the  Teuton  and  the 
Celt;  there  was  in  the  Norman  also  not  a  little 
of  the  Roman  who  had  so  long  ruled  Gaul,  and 
who  had  so  deeply  marked  it  with  certain  of  his 
own  characteristics.  Thus  it  was  that  the  Nor- 
man brought  into  England  a  Latin  tradition;  he 
had  acquired  something  of  the  Roman  adminis- 
trative skill,  something  of  the  Roman's  genius 
for  affairs.  After  the  Renascence,  Latin  influ- 
17 


THE    STOCK   THAT   SPEAKS   THE   LANGUAGE 

ences  were  to  affect  the  English  language  and 
English  literature;  but  it  was  after  the  conquest 
that  the  English  people  itself  came  first  in  con- 
tact with  certain  of  the  Roman  ideals. 

Matthew  Arnold  thought  that  we  owed  "to 
the  Latin  element  in  our  language  the  most  of 
that  very  rapidity  and  clear  decisiveness  by  which 
it  is  contradistinguished  from  the  modern  Ger- 
man " ;  and  he  found  in  the  Latinized  Normans 
in  England  "  the  sense  for  fact,  which  the  Celts 
had  not,  and  the  love  of  strenuousness,  clearness, 
and  rapidity,  the  high  Latin  spirit,  which  the 
Saxons  had  not. "  Perhaps  the  English  feeling  for 
style,  our  command  of  the  larger  rhetoric,  may  be 
due  to  this  blend  of  the  Norman ;  and  it  cannot  be 
denied  that  this  gift  has  not  been  granted  to  the 
modern  German.  The  fantastic  brilliancy  of 
De  Quincey  and  the  sonorous  picturesqueness  of 
Ruskin  are  alike  inconceivable  in  the  language 
of  Klopstock;  and  altho  there  is  a  pregnant 
concision  in  the  speeches  of  Bismarck  at  his  best, 
there  is  no  German  orator  who  ever  attained  the 
unfailing  dignity  and  the  lofty  affluence  of  Web- 
ster at  his  best. 

Less  than  two  centuries  after  the  good  King 
Alfred  had  declared  English  law  and  established 
English  literature,  the  Normans  came  and  saw 
and  conquered.  Less  than  three  centuries  after 
King  William  took  the  land  there  was  born  the 

18 


THE   STOCK   THAT   SPEAKS   THE    LANGUAGE 

first  great  English  poet.  If  the  language  is  to-day 
what  it  is,  it  is  because  of  Chaucer,  who  chose 
the  court  dialect  of  London  to  write  in,  and  who 
made  it  supple  for  his  own  use  and  the  use  of 
the  poets  that  were  to  come  after.  The  Norman 
conquest  had  brought  a  new  and  needed  contri- 
bution to  the  English  character;  it  had  resulted  in 
an  immense  enrichment  of  the  English  language; 
and  it  had  related  English  literature  again  to  the 
broad  current  of  European  life.  To  the  original 
Teutonic  basis  had  been  added  Celtic  and  Norman 
and  Latin  strains;  and  still  the  English  nature 
wrought  its  steady  will,  still  it  expressed  itself 
most  freely  and  most  fully  in  poetry.  And  in  no 
other  poet  are  certain  aspects  of  this  English  na- 
ture more  boldly  displayed  than  in  Chaucer,  in 
whom  we  find  a  fresh  feeling  for  the  visible 
world,  a  true  tenderness  of  sentiment,  a  joyous 
breadth  of  humor,  and  a  resolute  yet  delicate  han- 
dling of  human  character. 

Two  centuries  after  Chaucer  came  Shakspere, 
in  whom  the  English  nature  finds  its  fullest  ex- 
pression. The  making  of  England  was  then 
complete;  all  the  varied  elements  had  been  fused 
in  the  fire  of  a  struggle  for  existence  and  welded 
by  war  with  the  most  powerful  of  foes.  The 
race-characteristics  were  then  finally  determined ; 
and  in  Elizabethan  literature  they  are  splendidly 
exhibited.  Something  was  contributed  by  the 
'9 


THE  STOCK   THAT  SPEAKS  THE   LANGUAGE 

literature  of  the  Spain  that  the  Elizabethans  had 
stoutly  withstood,  and  something  more  by  the 
literature  of  the  Italy  so  many  of  them  knew  by 
travel;  but  all  was  absorbed,  combined,  and  as- 
similated by  the  English  nature,  like  the  contri- 
butions that  came  from  the  classics  of  Rome  and 
Greece.  Bacon  and  Cecil,  Drake  and  Ralegh, 
are  not  more  typical  of  that  sudden  and  glorious 
outpouring  of  English  individuality  than  are  Mar- 
lowe, Shakspere,  andjonson,  Spenser,  Chapman, 
and  Massinger.  In  that  greatest  period  of  the 
race  we  do  not  know  which  is  the  greater, 
the  daring  energy,  the  enthusiastic  impetuosity, 
the  ability  to  govern,  that  the  English  then  dis- 
played, or  the  mighty  sweep  and  range  of  the 
imagination  as  nobly  revealed  in  their  poetry. 
The  works  of  the  Elizabethan  writers  are  with 
us,  like  the  memory  of  the  deeds  of  the  Eliza- 
bethan adventurers,  as  evidence,  if  any  was  need- 
ful, that  the  peoples  that  speak  English  are  of  a 
truth  poetic,  that  they  are  not  prosaic. 

In  the  days  of  Elizabeth  the  English  began  to 
go  abroad  and  to  settle  here  and  there.  To  those 
who  came  to  America  there  were  added  in  due 
season  many  vigorous  folk  from  other  Teu- 
tonic sources ;  and  here  in  the  centuries  that  have 
followed  was  to  be  seen  a  fusion  of  races  and  a 
welding  into  one  nation  such  as  had  been  seen 
in  England  itself  several  centuries  earlier.  To 


THE  STOCK   THAT   SPEAKS   THE   LANGUAGE 

those  who  remained  in  England  there  came  few 
accretions  from  the  outside,  altho  when  the 
edict  of  Nantes  was  revoked  the  English  gained 
much  that  the  French  lost.  The  Huguenots  were 
stanch  men  and  sturdy,  of  great  ability  often, 
and  of  a  high  seriousness.  Some  crossed  the 
Channel  and  some  crossed  the  ocean;  and  no  one 
of  the  strands  which  have  been  twisted  to  make 
the  modern  American  is  more  worthy  than  this. 
More  important  than  this  French  contribution, 
perhaps,  was  another  infusion  of  the  Celtic  in- 
fluence. When  the  King  of  Scotland  became 
King  of  England,  his  former  subjects  swarmed 
to  London— preceding  by  a  century  the  Irishmen 
who  made  themselves  more  welcome  in  the 
English  capital,  with  their  airy  wit  and  their 
touch  of  Celtic  sentiment.  Far  heavier  than  the 
Scotch  raid  into  England,  and  the  Irish  invasion, 
was  the  influx  of  Scotch,  of  Irish,  and  of  Scotch- 
Irish  into  America.  At  the  very  time  when  Lord 
Lyndhurst  was  expressing  the  opinion  that  the 
English  held  the  Irish  to  be  "aliens  in  blood, 
aliens  in  speech,  aliens  in  religion,"  the  Irish 
were  withdrawing  in  their  thousands  from  the 
rule  of  a  people  that  felt  thus  toward  them ;  and 
they  were  making  homes  for  themselves  where 
prejudice  against  them  was  not  potent.  Yet 
in  England  itself  the  Irish  left  their  mark  on  lit- 
erature, especially  upon  comedy,  for  which  they 


THE  STOCK   THAT  SPEAKS   THE   LANGUAGE 

have  ever  revealed  a  delightful  aptitude;  and  in 
the  eighteenth  century  alone  the  stage  is  lightened 
and  brightened  by  the  plays  of  Steele,  of  Sheridan, 
and  of  Goldsmith.  About  the  end  of  the  same 
century  also  the  Scotch  began  to  make  their 
significant  and  stimulating  contribution  to  Eng- 
lish literature,  which  was  refreshed  again  by  Burns 
with  his  breath  of  sympathy,  by  Scott  with  his 
many-sided  charm,  and  by  Byron  with  his  re- 
sonant note  of  revolt. 

Just  as  the  Angles  and  the  Saxons  and  the  Jutes 
had  mingled  in  Great  Britain  to  make  the  English- 
man, and  had  been  modified  by  Celtic  and  Nor- 
man and  Latin  influences,  so  here  in  the  United 
States  the  Puritan  and  the  Cavalier,  the  Dutchman 
and  the  Huguenot  and  the  German,  the  Irish  and 
the  Scotch  and  the  Scotch-Irish,  have  all  blended 
to  make  the  American.  Not  a  few  of  the  original 
Teutonic  race-characteristics  recorded  by  Tacitus 
are  here  now,  as  active  as  ever;  and  not  a  few  of 
the  English  race-characteristics  as  revealed  by  the 
Elizabethan  dramatists  survive  in  America,  keep- 
ing company  with  many  a  locution  which  has 
dropped  out  of  use  in  England  itself.  There  is 
to-day  in  the  spoken  speech  of  the  United  States 
a  larger  freedom  than  in  the  spoken  speech  of 
Great  Britain,  a  figurative  vigor  that  the  Eliza- 
bethans would  have  relished  and  understood.  It 
is  not  without  significance  that  the  game  of  cards 


THE   STOCK   THAT  SPEAKS   THE   LANGUAGE 

best  liked  by  the  adventurers  who  worried  the 
Armada  should  have  been  born  again  to  delight 
the  Argonauts  of  '49.  The  characteristic  energy 
of  the  English  stock,  never  more  exuberantly 
displayed  than  under  Elizabeth,  suffered  no  dimi- 
nution in  crossing  the  Atlantic;  rather  has  it  been 
strengthened  on  this  side,  since  every  native 
American  must  be  the  descendant  of  some  man 
more  venturesome  than  his  kin  who  thought  best 
to  stay  at  home.  Nor  is  the  energy  less  imagi- 
native, altho  it  has  not  taken  mainly  a  literary 
expression.  "  There  was  no  chance  for  poetry 
among  the  Puritans,"  so  Lowell  reminded  us, 
"  and  yet  if  any  people  have  a  right  to  imagination, 
it  should  be  the  descendants  of  those  very  Puri- 
tans. "  And  he  added  tersely :  "  They  had  enough 
of  it,  or  they  could  never  have  conceived  the 
great  epic  they  did,  whose  books  are  States,  and 
which  is  written  on  this  continent  from  Maine  to 
California." 

More  than  half  those  who  speak  English  now 
dwell  in  the  United  States,  and  less  than  a  third 
dwell  within  the  British  Isles.  To  some  it  may 
seem  merely  fanciful,  no  doubt,  but  still  the  ques- 
tion may  be  put,  whether  the  British  or  the 
American  is  to-day  really  closer  to  the  Eliza- 
bethan ?  It  has  recently  been  remarked  that  the 
typical  John  Bull  was  invisible  in  England  while 
Shakspere  was  alive,  and  that  he  has  become 
23 


possible  in  Great  Britain  only  since  the  day  when 
these  United  States  declared  their  independence. 
Walter  Bagehot,  the  shrewdest  of  critics  of  his 
fellow-countrymen,  maintained  that  the  saving 
virtue  of  the  British  people  of  the  middle  of 
the  nineteenth  century  was  a  stolidity  closely 
akin  to  stupidity.  But  surely  the  Elizabethans 
were  not  stolid;  and  the  Americans  (who  have 
been  accused  of  many  things)  have  never  been 
accused  of  stupidity.  Mr.  Bernard  Bosanquet 
has  just  been  insisting  that  the  two  dominant 
notes  of  the  British  character  at  the  beginning  of 
the  twentieth  century  are  insularity  and  inarticu- 
lateness. The  Elizabethan  was  braggart  and  self- 
pleased  and  arrogant,  but  he  was  not  fairly  open 
to  the  reproach  of  insularity,  nor  was  he  in  the 
least  inarticulate.  Perhaps  insularity  and  inarti- 
culateness are  inseparable;  and  it  may  be  that  it  is 
the  immense  variety  of  the  United  States  that  has 
preserved  the  American  from  the  one,  as  the  prac- 
tice of  the  town-meeting  has  preserved  him  from 
the  other. 

No  longer  do  we  believe  that  there  is  any  spe- 
cial virtue  in  the  purity  of  race,  even  if  we  could 
discover  nowadays  any  people  who  had  a  just 
right  to  pride  themselves  on  this.  The  French 
are  descended  from  the  Gauls,  but  to  the  Gauls 
have  been  added  Romans  and  Franks;  the  Eng- 
lish are  descended  from  the  Teutons,  but  they 
24 


THE  STOCK   THAT  SPEAKS   THE   LANGUAGE 

have  received  many  accretions  from  other 
sources;  and  the  Americans  are  descended  from 
the  British,  but  it  is  undeniable  that  they  have 
differentiated  themselves  somehow.  The  ad- 
mixture of  varied  stocks  is  held  to  be  a  source 
of  freshness  and  of  renewed  vitality;  and  it  may 
be  that  this  is  the  cause  of  the  American  alertness 
and  venturesomeness.  And  as  yet  these  foreign 
elements  have  but  little  modified  the  essential 
type;  for  just  as  the  English  nature  wrought  its 
steady  will  through  the  centuries,  so  the  Ameri- 
can characteristics  have  been  imposed  on  all  the 
welter  of  nationalities  that  swirl  together  in  the 
United  States. 

Throughout  the  land  there  is  one  language,  a 
development  of  the  language  of  King  Alfred,  and 
one  law,  a  development  of  the  law  of  King  Alfred ; 
and  throughout  the  land  there  are  schools  such 
as  the  good  king  wished  for.  American  ideals 
are  not  quite  the  same  as  British  ideals,  but 
they  differ  only  a  little,  and  they  have  both  flow- 
ered from  the  English  root,  as  the  earlier  English 
ideals  had  flowered  from  a  Teutonic  root.  The 
English  stock  has  displayed  in  the  United  States 
the  same  marvelous  assimilating  faculty  that  it 
displayed  centuries  ago  in  Great  Britain,  the  same 
extraordinary  power  of  getting  the  sojourners 
within  its  borders  to  accept  its  ideals.  The  law 
of  imitation  is  irresistible,  as  M.  Tarde  has 
25 


THE   STOCK   THAT   SPEAKS   THE   LANGUAGE 

shown;  and  as  M.  Fouillee  asserts,  a  nation  is 
really  united  and  unified  only  when  its  whole 
population  thrills  at  the  same  appeal  and  vibrates 
when  the  same  chord  is  struck.  Then  there  is 
a  consciousness  of  nationality  and  of  true  na- 
tional solidarity.  Throughout  the  United  States 
there  is  a  unanimous  acceptance  of  the  old  Eng- 
lish ideals— a  liking  for  energy,  a  respect  for 
character,  a  belief  in  equality  before  the  law,  and 
an  acceptance  of  individual  responsibility.  These 
are  the  ideals  which  will  echo  again  and  again  in 
English  literature  on  both  shores  of  the  Atlantic, 
as  they  have  echoed  so  often  since  King  Alfred 
died.  "  A  thousand  years  are  but  as  yesterday 
when  it  is  past,  and  as  a  watch  in  the  night." 
(1901) 


26 


II 

THE  FUTURE  OF  THE 
LANGUAGE 


THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  LANGUAGE 

TWO  apparently  contradictory  tendencies  are 
to-day  visible.  One  of  them  is  revealed  by 
our  increasing  interest  in  the  less  important 
languages  and  in  the  more  important  dia- 
lects. The  other  is  to  be  seen  in  the  immense 
expansion  of  the  several  peoples  using  the  three 
or  four  most  widely  spoken  European  tongues, 
an  expansion  rapidly  giving  them  a  supremacy 
which  renders  hopeless  any  attempt  of  the  less 
important  European  languages  everto  equal  them. 
(It  may  be  noted  now  once  for  all  that  in  this 
paper  only  the  Indo-European  languages  are  taken 
into  account,  altho  Arabic  did  succeed  for  a  while 
in  making  itself  the  chief  tongue  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean basin,  overrunning  Sicily  and  even  thrust- 
ing itself  up  into  Spain,  and  altho  Chinese  may 
have  a  fateful  expansion  in  the  dark  future.) 

As  an  instance  of  the  first  of  the  two  conflict- 
ing tendencies,  we  have  in  France  the  movement 
of  \\\Q  felibres  \o  revive  Provencal,  and  to  make 
it  again  a  fit  vehicle  for  poetry.     We  have  in 
29 


THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  LANGUAGE 

Norway  an  effort  to  differentiate  written  Nor- 
wegian from  the  Danish,  which  has  hitherto  been 
accepted  as  the  standard  speech  of  all  Scandi- 
navian authors.  We  have  in  Belgium  an  in- 
creasing resistance  to  French,  which  is  the  official 
tongue,  and  an  attempt  arbitrarily  to  resuscitate 
the  Flemish  dialect.  We  have  in  Switzerland  a 
desire  to  keep  alive  the  primitive  and  moribund 
Romansh.  We  have  in  North  Britain  a  demand 
for  at  least  a  professorship  of  broad  Scots.  We 
see  also  that,  among  the  languages  of  the  smaller 
nations,  neither  Dutch  nor  Portuguese  shows  any 
symptoms  of  diminishing  vitality,  while  Ruma- 
nian has  been  suddenly  encouraged  by  the  political 
independence  of  the  people  speaking  it. 

All  this  is  curious  and  interesting;  and  yet  at 
the  very  period  when  these  developments  are  in 
progress,  other  influences  are  at  work  on  behalf 
of  the  languages  of  the  greater  races.  The  de- 
velopments noted  above  are  largely  the  work 
of  scholars  and  of  students;  they  are  the  arti- 
ficial products  of  provincial  pride;  and  they 
are  destined  to  defeat  by  forces  as  invincible  as 
those  of  nature  itself.  In  their  different  degrees 
Provencal  and  Flemish  are  struggling  for  exis- 
tence against  French;  but  French  itself  is  not 
gaining  in  its  old  rivalry  with  English  and  with 
German. 

At  the  end  of  the  seventeenth  century  French 
30 


THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  LANGUAGE 

was  the  language  of  diplomacy ;  it  was  the  speech 
of  the  courts  of  Europe;  it  was  the  one  modern 
tongue  an  educated  man  in  England  or  in  Ger- 
many, in  Spain  or  in  Italy,  needed  to  acquire. 
As  Latin  had  been  the  world-language  in  the 
days  of  the  Empire,  so  French  bade  fair  to  be  the 
world-language  in  the  days  when  all  the  parts 
of  the  earth  should  be  bound  together  by  the 
bands  of  commerce  and  finance.  In  the  eigh- 
teenth century  the  supremacy  of  French  was  still 
indisputable;  but  in  the  nineteenth  century  it 
disappeared.  And,  unless  all  calculations  of 
probability  fail  us,  somewhere  in  the  twentieth 
century  French  will  have  fallen  from  the  first 
place  to  the  fifth,  just  below  Spanish,  just  above 
Italian,  and  far,  far  beneath  English  and  Russian 
and  German. 

It  was  the  social  instinct  of  the  French  which 
made  their  language  so  neat,  so  apt  for  epigram 
and  compliment,  so  admirable  and  so  adequate  for 
criticism ;  and  it  was  the  energy  of  the  English- 
speaking  peoples,  their  individuality,  their  inde- 
pendence, which  made  our  language  so  sturdy, 
so  vigorous,  so  powerful. 

An  excess  of  the  social  instinct  it  is  which  has 
kept  the  French  at  home,  close  to  the  borders  of 
France,  and  which  has  thus  restricted  the  expan- 
sion of  their  language,  while  it  is  also  an  excess 
of  the  energy  of  our  stock  that  has  scattered  Eng- 
31 


THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  LANGUAGE 

lish  all  over  the  world,  on  every  shore  of  all  the 
seven  seas.  And  now  that  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury has  drawn  to  an  end,  if  we  can  guess  at  the 
future  from  our  acquaintance  with  the  past,  we 
are  justified  in  believing  that  the  world-language 
at  the  end  of  the  twentieth  century— should  any 
one  tongue  succeed  in  winning  universal  accep- 
tance—will be  English.  If  it  is  not  English,  then 
it  will  not  be  German  or  Spanish  or  French;  it 
will  be  Russian. 

This  attempt  to  foretell  the  future  is  not  a  ran- 
dom venture  or  a  reckless  brag;  it  is  based  on  a 
comparison  of  the  number  of  people  speaking  the 
different  European  languages  at  different  periods. 
At  my  request  Mr.  N.  I.  Stone,  of  the  School  of 
Political  Science  of  Columbia  University,  made  an 
examination  of  the  statistics,  in  so  far  as  they 
are  obtainable.  The  figures  are  rarely  absolutely 
trustworthy  before  the  nineteenth  century — in- 
deed, they  are  sometimes  little  better  than  guess- 
work. Yet  they  are  approximately  accurate,  and 
they  will  serve  fairly  well  for  purposes  of  com- 
parison. They  make  plain  the  way  in  which  one 
language  has  gained  on  another  in  the  past;  and 
they  afford  material  for  us  to  hazard  a  prediction 
as  to  the  languages  likely  to  gain  most  in  the 
immediate  future. 

In  the  fourteenth  century  the  population  of 
France  was  about  ten  millions,  and  that  of  the 
32 


THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  LANGUAGE 

British  Isles  probably  less  than  four  millions.  In 
both  territories  there  were  certainly  many  who 
did  not  speak  the  chief  language;  yet  the  pro- 
portion of  those  who  spoke  French  to  those  who 
spoke  English  was  at  least  ten  to  four. 

Toward  the  end  of  the  fifteenth  century  the 
British  Isles  still  had  less  than  four  millions,  while 
France  had  more  than  twelve  millions.  At  this 
same  period  Italy  had  a  few  more  than  nine  mil- 
lions, and  Spain  a  few  less,  while  the  Germans 
(including  always  the  Austrians  who  spoke  Ger- 
man) were  about  ten  millions. 

Coming  toward  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  cen- 
tury, we  find  six  millions  in  the  British  Isles, 
more  than  fourteen  millions  in  France  and  in  the 
French-speaking  portions  of  the  adjacent  coun- 
tries, and  more  than  ten  millions  in  Italy.  The 
Russians  then  numbered  nearly  four  millions  and 
a  half— only  a  million  and  a  half  less  than  the 
British. 

At  the  very  end  of  the  seventeenth  century  the 
number  of  those  speaking  English  was  nearly 
eight  millions  and  a  half — most  of  them  still  in 
the  British  Isles,  but  some  of  them  already  de- 
parted into  the  colonies  in  America  and  else- 
where. The  number  of  those  speaking  French 
was  twenty  millions,  of  those  speaking  Italian 
a  few  less  than  twelve  millions,  and  of  those 
speaking  Russian  about  fifteen  millions.  Those 
33 


THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  LANGUAGE 

speaking  Spanish  were  chiefly  at  home  in  the 
Iberian  peninsula,  but  not  a  few  were  in  the  colo- 
nies in  America :  they  amounted  to  about  eight 
millions  in  all,  the  mother-country  having  wasted 
her  people  in  ruinous  wars. 

At  the  very  end  of  the  eighteenth  century 
we  find  the  English-speaking  peoples  on  both 
shores  of  the  Atlantic  swollen  to  twenty-two 
millions,  having  nearly  trebled  in  a  hundred 
years,  while  the  French  had  added  only  a  third 
to  their  population,  amounting  in  all  to  a  few 
more  than  twenty-seven  millions.  The  Germans 
were  about  thirty-three  millions,  having  passed 
the  French;  and  the  Italians  were  a  few  more 
than  thirteen  millions,  having  increased  very 
slowly.  Neither  Germans  nor  Italians  had  as 
yet  been  able  either  to  achieve  unity  for  them- 
selves or  to  found  colonies  elsewhere.  The 
Spanish,  including  their  pure-blooded  colonists, 
numbered  perhaps  ten  millions.  The  Russians 
had  increased  to  twenty-five  millions,  the 
boundaries  of  their  empire  having  been  widely 
extended. 

The  nineteenth  century  was  a  period  of  unex- 
ampled expansion  for  the  English-speaking  race, 
who  have  spread  to  India,  to  Australia,  and  to 
Africa,  besides  filling  up  the  western  parts  of  the 
United  States;  they  now  number  probably  be- 
tween a  hundred  and  twenty-five  and  a  hundred 
34 


THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  LANGUAGE 

and  thirty  millions.  The  Russians  have  also 
pushed  their  borders  across  Asia,  and  they  also 
show  an  immense  increase,  now  numbering  about 
a  hundred  and  thirty  millions,  altho  probably  a 
very  large  proportion  of  their  conglomerate 
population  does  not  yet  speak  Russian.  The 
Germans  have  supplied  millions  of  immigrants  to 
the  United  States,  and  thousands  of  expatriated 
traders  to  all  the  great  cities  of  the  world;  and  in 
spite  of  this  loss  they  now  number  about  seventy 
millions  (including,  as  before,  the  German  por- 
tions of  the  Austro-Hungarian  monarchy).  The 
Spanish-speaking  peoples  in  the  old  world  and 
the  new  are  about  forty-two  millions,  not  half 
of  them  being  in  Spain  itself. 

The  French  lag  far  behind  in  this  multiplica- 
tion; they  number  now  a  few  more  than  forty 
millions,  including  those  Belgians  and  Swiss  who 
have  French  for  their  mother-tongue.  The  rela- 
tive loss  of  the  French  can  best  be  shown  by  a 
comparison  with  the  English  after  an  interval  of 
five  hundred  years.  In  the  fourteenth  century,  as 
we  have  seen,  those  who  spoke  French  were  to 
those  who  spoke  English  as  ten  to  four;  in  the 
nineteenth  century  those  who  speak  English  are 
to  those  who  speak  French  as  one  hundred  and 
thirty  to  forty.  In  other  words,  the  French  dur- 
ing five  centuries  have  increased  fourfold,  while 
the  English  have  multiplied  more  than  thirtyfold. 

35 


THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  LANGUAGE 

French  is  still  the  language  most  frequently 
employed  by  diplomatists;  it  is  still  the  tongue  in 
which  educated  men  of  differing  nationalities 
are  most  likely  to  be  able  to  converse  with  each 
other.  But  its  supremacy  has  departed  forever. 
It  has  long  been  fighting  a  losing  battle.  Its 
hope  of  becoming  the  world-language  of  the 
future  vanished,  never  to  reappear,  when  Clive 
grasped  India  and  when  Wolfe  defeated  Mont- 
calm.  At  a  brief  interval  the  French  let  slip 
their  final  chances  of  holding  either  the  east  or 
the  west. 

The  English-speaking  peoples  and,the  Russians 
have  entered  into  the  inheritance  which  the 
French  have  renounced.  The  future  is  theirs, 
for  they  are  ready  to  go  forth  and  subdue  the 
waste  places  of  the  earth.  They  are  the  great 
civilizing  forces  of  the  twentieth  century,  each 
in  its  own  way  and  each  in  its  own  degree. 
The  Russians  have  revealed  a  remarkable 
faculty  of  assimilation,  and  have  taken  over  the 
wild  tribes  of  the  east,  which  they  are  slowly 
starting  along  the  path  of  progress.  The  Eng- 
lish—  by  which  I  mean  always  the  peoples  who 
speak  the  English  language  —  have  possessed 
themselves  of  North  America  and  of  South  Africa 
and  of  Australia;  and  there  is  no  sign  yet  visible 
of  any  lack  of  energy  or  of  any  decrease  of  vigor 
in  the  branches  of  this  hardy  and  prolific  stock. 
36 


THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  LANGUAGE 

At  the  rate  of  increase  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury, the  end  of  the  twentieth  century  will  find 
eight  hundred  and  forty  millions  speaking  Eng- 
lish and  five  hundred  millions  speaking  Russian, 
while  those  who  speak  German  will  be  one  hun- 
dred and  thirty  millions  and  those  who  speak 
French  perhaps  sixty  millions.  But  it  is  very 
unlikely  that  the  rate  of  increase  in  the  twentieth 
century  will  be  what  it  was  in  the  nineteenth. 
The  extraordinary  expansion  of  the  United  States 
is  the  salient  phenomenon  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury; and  it  is  doubtfully  possible  and  certainly 
improbable  that  any  such  expansion  can  take 
place  in  the  twentieth  century,  even  in  South 
Africa.  On  the  other  hand,  the  building  of  the 
Siberian  railroad  may  open  to  the  Russians  an 
outlet  for  the  overflow  of  their  population  not 
unlike  that  offered  to  the  English  by  the  opening 
of  the  middle  west  of  the  United  States.  The 
outpouring  of  Germans,  hitherto  directed  chiefly 
to  the  United  States  (where  they  have  been  taught 
to  speak  English),  may  perhaps  hereafter  be 
diverted  to  German  colonies,  where  the  native 
tongue  will  be  cherished. 

Thus  it  seems  likely  that,  while  the  estimate 
for  the  year  2000  of  one  hundred  and  thirty  mil- 
lion Germans  is  none  too  large,  that  of  five  hun- 
dred million  Russians  is  perhaps  too  small,  and 
that  of  eight  hundred  and  fifty  millions  for  the 
37 


THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  LANGUAGE 

English-speaking  peoples  is  probably  highly  in- 
flated. What,  however,  we  have  no  reasonable 
right  to  doubt  is  that  German  will  be  a  bad  third, 
as  French  will  be  a  bad  fourth ;  and  that  the  Eng- 
lish language  and  the  Russian  will  stand  far  at 
the  head  of  the  list,  one  all-powerful  in  the  west 
and  the  other  all-powerful  in  the  east.  Which 
of  them  will  prevail  against  the  other  in  the 
twenty-first  century  no  man  can  now  foretell, 
nor  can  he  get  any  help  from  statistics. 

The  issue  of  that  conflict  cannot  be  foreseen  by 
any  inspection  of  figures,  for  it  will  turn  not  so 
much  on  mere  numbers — altho  the  possession 
of  these  will  be  an  immense  advantage:  it  will 
be  decided  rather  by  the  race-characteristics  of 
the  two  stocks  when  thrust  into  irresistible 
opposition.  The  manners  and  customs  of  the 
people  who  speak  Russian  and  of  the  peoples 
who  speak  English,  their  physical  strength  and 
their  vitality,  their  ideals,  social  and  political  — 
all  these  things  will  be  the  decisive  factors  in  the 
final  combat.  Whether  Russian  or  English  shall 
be  the  world-language  of  the  future  depends  not 
on  the  language  itself  and  its  merits  and  demer- 
its, but  on  the  sturdiness  of  those  who  shall  then 
speak  it,  on  their  strength  of  will,  on  their  power 
of  organization,  on  their  readiness  to  sacrifice 
themselves  for  the  common  cause,  and  on  their 
fidelity  to  their  ideals. 

38 


THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  LANGUAGE 

Russian  is  a  beautiful  language,  so  those  say 
who  know  it  best:  it  is  fresh  and  vigorous,  as 
might  be  expected  in  a  speech  the  literature  of 
which  is  not  yet  old ;  it  is  also  as  clear  and  as 
direct  as  French.  But  it  has  one  insuperable 
disadvantage:  its  grammar  is  as  primitive  and 
as  complex  as  the  grammar  of  German  or  the 
grammar  of  Greek.  The  verb  has  an  elaborate 
conjugation,  the  noun  an  elaborate  declension, 
the  adjective  an  elaborate  method  of  agreement 
in  gender,  number,  and  case. 

Now  English  is  fortunate  in  having  discarded 
nearly  all  this  primitive  machinery,  which  is 
always  a  sign  of  linguistic  immaturity.  The 
English  language  has  shed  almost  all  its  un- 
necessary complications;  it  has  advanced  from 
complexity  toward  simplicity,  while  Russian 
still  lingers  in  its  unreformed  condition  of  arbi- 
trary elaboration.  One  objection,  it  may  be 
noted,  to  Volapiik,  which  a  German  scholar 
kindly  invented  as  the  world-language  of  the 
future,  was  that  its  grammar  was  of  this  primi- 
tive and  complicated  type. 

In  these  days  of  the  printing-press  and  of  the 
schoolmaster  any  radical  modification  of  the 
mother-tongue  is  increasingly  difficult,  so  that  it 
is  highly  improbable  that  Russian  can  now  ever 
shake  off  these  grammatical  encumbrances  that 
really  unfit  it  for  use  as  a  world-language  to  be 

3Q 


THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  LANGUAGE 

acquired  by  all  men.  Russian  is  one  of  the  most 
backward  of  modern  languages  in  its  progress 
toward  grammatical  simplicity;  and  English  is 
one  of  the  most  forward.  Italian  is  also  a  lan- 
guage which  had  the  good  fortune  partly  to  re- 
form its  grammar  before  the  invention  of  printing 
made  the  operation  almost  impossible;  and  Ital- 
ian is  like  English  in  that  it  is  a  very  easy  lan- 
guage to  learn  by  word  of  mouth,  as  the  rules  of 
grammar  we  must  needs  obey  are  very  few, 
—  tho  in  this  respect  English  is  superior  even  to 
Italian.  If  English  is  hard  to  learn  when  it  is 
taught  by  the  eye  instead  of  the  ear,  this  is  be- 
cause of  our  cumbersome  and  antiquated  spelling ; 
here  the  Italian  is  far  better  off  than  the  English. 

Indeed,  it  is  not  a  little  strange  that  the  English 
language,  which  is  one  of  the  most  advanced  in 
grammatical  simplicity,  is  one  of  the  most  belated 
in  orthographic  simplicity.  In  no  other  modern 
language  is  the  system  of  spelling  —  if  system 
that  can  be  called  which  has  no  rule  or  reason  — 
more  arbitrary  and  more  chaotic  than  in  English ; 
and  no  other  peculiarity  of  our  language  does 
more  to  retard  its  diffusion  than  its  wantonly 
foolish  orthography. 

Probably  much  of  the  violent  opposition  to  the 
simplification  of  our  spelling  is  due  to  the  fanatic 
zeal  of  the  phonetic  reformers,  who  have  fright- 
ened away  all  the  timid  respecters  of  tradition  by 
40 


THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  LANGUAGE 

their  rash  insistence  upon  the  immediate  adoption 
of  some  brand-new  and  comprehensive  scheme. 
The  English-speaking  peoples  are  essentially  con- 
servative and  unfailingly  opportunist;  they  abhor 
all  radical  remedies.  They  are  wont  to  remove 
ancient  abuses  piecemeal,  and  not  root  and 
branch.  The  most  they  can  be  got  to  do  in  the 
immediate  future  is  to  follow  the  example  of 
the  Italians,  and  to  lop  off  gradually  the  most 
flagrant  inconsistencies  and  absurdities  of  our 
present  spelling,  here  a  little  and  there  a  little, 
going  forward  hesitatingly,  but  never  stopping. 

In  this  good  work  of  injecting  a  little  more 
sense  into  our  orthography,  as  in  the  other  good 
work  of  still  further  simplifying  our  grammar  as 
occasion  serves  and  opportunity  offers,  we  Amer- 
icans may  have  to  take  the  lead.  The  English 
language  is  ours  by  inheritance,  and  our  interest 
in  it  is  as  deep  and  as  wide  as  that  of  our  British 
cousins.  As  Mark  Twain  has  put  it,  with  his 
customary  shrewdness,  it  is  "  the  King's  Eng- 
lish "  no  longer,  for  it  has  gone  into  the  hands 
of  a  company,  and  a  majority  of  the  stock  is  held 
on  our  side  of  the  Atlantic. 

We  Americans  must  awake  to  a  sense  of  our 
responsibility  as  the  chief  of  the  English-speaking 
peoples.  The  tie  that  binds  the  British  colonies 
to  the  British  crown  is  strong  only  because  it  is 
loose;  and  in  Australia  and  in  Canada  the  condi- 
4' 


THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  LANGUAGE 

tions  of  life  resemble  those  of  the  United  States 
rather  than  those  of  Great  Britain.  The  British 
Isles  are  the  birthplace  of  our  race,  but  they 
no  longer  contain  the  most  important  branch 
of  the  English-speaking  peoples.  On  both 
sides  of  the  Atlantic,  and  afar  in  the  Pacific  also, 
and  along  the  shores  of  the  Indian  Ocean,  are 
"the  subjects  of  King  Shakspere,"  the  students 
of  Chaucer  and  Dryden,  the  readers  of  Scott  and 
Thackeray  and  Hawthorne;  but  most  of  them, 
or  at  least  the  largest  single  group,  will  be  in  the 
United  States  at  the  end  of  the  twentieth  century, 
as  they  are  at  the  end  of  the  nineteenth. 

No  one  has  more  clearly  seen  the  essential 
unity  of  the  English-speaking  race,  and  no  one 
has  more  accurately  stated  the  relation  of  the 
American  branch  of  this  race  to  the  British  branch, 
than  the  late  John  Richard  Green.  In  his  chap- 
ter on  the  independence  of  America,  he  recorded 
the  fact  that  since  1776  "the  life  of  the  English 
people  has  flowed  not  in  one  current,  but  in 
two;  and  while  the  older  has  shown  little  sign 
of  lessening,  the  younger  has  fast  risen  to  a 
greatness  which  has  changed  the  face  of  the 
world.  In  wealth  and  material  energy,  as  in 
numbers,  it  far  surpasses  the  mother-country 
from  which  it  sprang.  It  is  already  the  main 
branch  of  the  English  people;  and  in  the  days 
that  are  at  hand  the  main  current  of  that  people's 
42 


THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  LANGUAGE 

history  must  run  along  the  channel,  not  of  the 
Thames  or  the  Mersey,  but  of  the  Hudson  and 
the  Mississippi." 

When  English  becomes  the  world-language, — 
if  our  speech  ever  is  raised  to  fill  that  position  of 
honor  and  usefulness, —  it  will  be  the  English  lan- 
guage as  it  is  spoken  by  all  the  branches  of  the 
English  race,  no  doubt;  but  the  dominant  influ- 
ence in  deciding  what  the  future  of  that  language 
shall  be  must  come  from  the  United  States.  The 
English  of  the  future  will  be  the  English  that  we 
shall  use  here  in  the  United  States;  and  it  is  for 
us  to  hand  it  down  to  our  children  fitted  for  the 
service  it  is  to  render. 

This  task  is  ours,  not  to  be  undertaken  boast- 
fully or  vaingloriously  or  in  any  spirit  of  provin- 
cial self-assertion,  on  the  one  hand,  or  of  colonial 
self-depreciation  on  the  other,  but  with  a  full 
sense  of  the  burden  imposed  upon  us  and  of  the 
privilege  that  accompanies  it.  It  is  our  duty  to 
do  what  we  can  to  keep  our  English  speech  fresh 
and  vigorous,  to  help  it  draw  new  life  and  power 
from  every  proper  source,  to  resist  all  the  attempts 
of  pedants  to  cramp  it  and  restrain  its  healthy 
growth,  and  to  urge  along  the  simplification  of  its 
grammar  and  its  orthography,  so  that  it  shall  be 
ready  against  the  day  when  it  is  really  a  world- 
language. 
(1898) 

43 


Ill 

THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE  IN 
THE  UNITED  STATES 


THE   ENGLISH   LANGUAGE   IN 
THE    UNITED   STATES 

WHEN  Benjamin  Franklin  was  in  England 
in  1760,  he  received  a  letter  from  David 
Hume  commenting  on  the  style  of  an  essay  of 
his  writing  and  on  his  choice  of  words;  and  in 
his  reply  Franklin  modestly  thanked  his  friend 
for  the  criticism,  and  took  occasion  to  declare  his 
hope  that  we  Americans  would  always  "make 
the  best  English  of  this  island  our  standard." 
And  yet  when  France  acknowledged  the  inde- 
pendence of  the  United  States  in  1778  and  Frank- 
lin was  sent  to  Paris  as  our  minister,  Congress 
duly  considered  the  proper  forms  and  ceremonies 
to  be  observed  in  doing  business  with  foreign 
countries,  and  finally  resolved  that  "  all  speeches 
or  communications  may,  if  the  public  ministers 
choose  it,  be  in  the  language  of  their  respective 
countries;  and  all  replies  or  answers  shall  be  in 
the  language  of  the  United  States." 

What  is  "  the  language  of  the  United  States  "? 
Is  it  "  the  best  English "  of  Great   Britain,   as 

47 


THE   ENGLISH   LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED  STATES 

Franklin  hoped  it  would  always  be  ?  Franklin 
was  unusually  far-sighted,  but  even  he  could 
not  foresee  what  is  perhaps  the  most  extraordi- 
nary event  of  the  nineteenth  century,— an  era 
abounding  in  the  extraordinary,—  the  marvelous 
spread  and  immense  expansion  of  the  English 
language.  It  is  not  only  along  the  banks  of  the 
Thames  and  the  Tweed  and  the  Shannon  that 
children  are  now  losing  irrecoverable  hours  on  the 
many  absurdities  of  English  orthography:  a  like 
wanton  wastefulness  there  is  also  on  the  shores 
of  the  Hudson,  of  the  Mississippi,  and  of  the 
Columbia,  while  the  same  A  B  C's  are  parroted 
by  the  little  ones  of  those  who  live  where  the 
Ganges  rolls  down  its  yellow  sand  and  of  those 
who  dwell  in  the  great  island  which  is  almost 
riverless.  No  parallel  can  be  found  in  history 
for  this  sudden  spreading  out  of  the  English 
language  in  the  past  hundred  years— not  even  the 
diffusion  of  Latin  during  the  century  when  the 
rule  of  Rome  was  most  widely  extended. 

Among  the  scattered  millions  who  now  employ 
our  common  speech,  in  England  itself,  in  Scot- 
land, Wales,  and  Ireland,  in  the  United  States  and 
Canada,  in  India  and  in  Australia,  in  Egypt  and 
in  South  Africa,  there  is  no  stronger  bond  of 
union  than  the  language  itself.  There  is  no  like- 
lihood that  any  political  association  will  ever  be 
sought  or  achieved.  The  tie  that  fastens  the 
48 


THE   ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES 

more  independent  colonies  to  the  mother-coun- 
try is  loose  enough  now,  even  if  it  is  never 
further  relaxed;  and  less  than  half  of  those 
who  have  English  for  their  mother-tongue  owe 
any  allegiance  whatever  to  England.  The  Eng- 
lish-speaking inhabitants  of  the  British  Empire 
are  apparently  fewer  than  the  inhabitants  of 
the  American  republic;  and  the  population  of  the 
United  Kingdom  itself  is  only  a  little  more  than 
half  the  population  of  the  United  States. 

To  set  down  these  facts  is  to  point  out  that 
the  English  language  is  no  longer  a  personal 
possession  of  the  people  of  England.  The 
power  of  the  head  of  the  British  Empire  over 
what  used  to  be  called  the  "  King's  English  "  is 
now  as  little  recognized  as  his  power  over  what 
used  to  be  called  the  "king's  evil."  We  may 
regret  that  this  is  the  case,  or  we  may  rejoice  at 
it;  but  we  cannot  well  deny  the  fact  itself.  And 
thus  we  are  face  to  face  with  more  than  one  very 
interesting  question.  What  is  going  to  become 
of  the  language  now  it  is  thus  dispersed  abroad 
and  freed  from  all  control  by  a  central  authority 
and  exposed  to  all  sorts  of  alien  influences  ?  Is 
it  bound  to  become  corrupted  and  to  sink  from  its 
high  estate  into  a  mire  of  slang  and  into  a  welter 
of  barbarously  fashioned  verbal  novelties  ?  What, 
more  especially,  is  going  to  be  the  future  of  the 
English  language  here  in  America  ?  Must  we  fear 
49 


THE  ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES 

the  dread  possibility  that  the  speech  of  the  peo- 
ples on  the  opposite  sides  of  the  Western  Ocean 
will  diverge  at  last  until  the  English  language 
will  divide  into  two  branches,  those  who  speak 
British  being  hardly  able  to  understand  those 
who  speak  American,  and  those  who  speak 
American  being  hardly  able  to  understand  those 
who  speak  British  ?  Mark  Twain  is  a  humorist, 
it  is  true,  but  he  is  very  shrewd  and  he  has 
abundant  common  sense;  and  it  was  Mark 
Twain  who  declared  a  score  of  years  ago  that  he 
spoke  the  "American  language." 

The  science  of  linguistics  is  among  the  young- 
est, and  yet  it  has  already  established  itself  so 
firmly  on  the  solid  ground  of  ascertained  truth 
that  it  has  been  able  to  overthrow  with  ease  one 
and  another  of  the  many  theories  which  were  ac- 
cepted without  question  before  it  came  into  being. 
For  example,  time  was— and  the  time  is  not 
so  very  remote,  it  may  be  remarked— time  was 
when  the  little  group  of  more  or  less  highly  edu- 
cated men  who  were  at  the  center  of  authority 
in  the  capital  of  any  nation  had  no  doubt  what- 
soever as  to  the  superiority  of  their  way  of  speak- 
ing their  own  language  over  the  manner  in 
which  it  might  be  spoken  by  the  vast  majority 
of  their  fellow-citizens  deprived  of  the  advan- 
tages of  a  court  training.  This  little  group  set 
the  standard  of  speech;  and  the  standard  they 
50 


THE   ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   IN   THE    UNITED   STATES 

set  was  accepted  as  final  and  not  to  be  tampered 
with  under  penalty  of  punishment  for  the  crime 
of  lese-majesty.  They  held  that  any  divergence 
from  the  customs  of  speaking  and  writing  they 
themselves  cherished  was  due  to  ignorance  and 
probably  to  obstinacy.  They  believed  that  the 
court  dialect  which  they  had  been  brought  up  to 
use  was  the  only  true  and  original  form  of  the 
language;  and  they  swiftly  stigmatized  as  a  gross 
impropriety  every  usage  and  every  phrase  with 
which  they  themselves  did  not  happen  to  be 
familiar.  And  in  thus  maintaining  the  sole 
validity  of  their  personal  habits  of  speech  they 
had  no  need  for  self-assertion,  since  it  never  en- 
tered into  the  head  of  any  one  not  belonging  to 
the  court  circle  to  question  for  a  second  the 
position  thus  tacitly  declared. 

Yet  if  modern  methods  of  research  -have  made 
anything  whatever  indisputable  in  the  history  of 
human  speech,  they  have  "completely  disproved 
the  assumption  which  underlies  this  implicit 
claim  of  the  courtiers.  We  know  now  that  the 
urban  dialect  is  not  the  original  language  of  which 
the  rural  dialects  are  but  so  many  corruptions. 
We  know,  indeed,  that  the  rural  dialects  are 
often  really  closer  to  the  original  tongue  than  the 
urban  dialect;  and  that  the  urban  dialect  itself 
was  once  as  rude  as  its  fellows,  and  that  it  owes 
its  preeminence  rarely  to  any  superiority  of  its 


THE   ENGLISH   LANGUAGE  IN   THE   UNITED  STATES 

own  over  its  rivals,  but  rather  to  the  fact  that  it 
chanced  to  be  the  speech  of  a  knot  of  men  more 
masterful  than  the  inhabitants  of  any  other  vil- 
lage, and  able  therefore  to  expand  their  village  to 
a  town  and  at  last  to  a  city,  which  imposed  its 
rule  on  the  neighboring  villages,  the  inhabitants 
of  these  being  by  that  time  forgetful  that  they 
had  once  striven  with  it  on  almost  equal  terms. 
Generally  it  is  the  stability  given  by  political  pre- 
eminence which  leads  to  the  development  of  a 
literature,  without  which  no  dialect  can  retain  its 
linguistic  supremacy. 

When  the  sturdy  warriors  whose  homes  were 
clustered  on  one  or  another  of  the  seven  hills  of 
Rome  began  to  makealliances  and  conquests,  they 
rendered  possible  the  future  development  of  their 
rough  Italic  into  the  Latin  language  which  has 
left  its  mark  on  almost  every  modern  European 
tongue.  The  humble  allies  of  the  early  Romans, 
who  possessed  dialects  of  an  equal  antiquity  and 
of  an  equal  possibility  of  improvement,  could  not 
but  obey  the  laws  of  imitation;  and  they  sought, 
perforce,  to  bring  their  vocabulary  and  their  syn- 
tax into  conformity  with  that  of  the  men  who 
had  shown  themselves  more  powerful.  Thus 
one  of  the  Italic  dialects  was  singled  out  by  for- 
tune for  an  extraordinary  future,  and  the  other 
Italic  dialects  were  left  in  obscurity,  altho 
they  were  each  of  them  as  old  as  the  Roman  and 
52 


THE   ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED  STATES 

as  available  for  development.  These  other  dia- 
lects have  even  suffered  the  ignominy  of  being 
supposed  to  be  corruptions  of  their  triumphant 
brother. 

The  French  philologist  Darmesteter  concisely 
explained  the  stages  of  this  development  of  one 
local  speech  at  the  expense  of  its  neighbors.  As 
it  gains  in  dignity  its  fellows  fall  into  the  shadow. 
A  local  speech  thus  neglected  is  a  patois;  and  a 
local  speech  which  achieves  the  dignity  of  litera- 
ture is  a  dialect.  These  written  tongues  spread 
on  all  sides  and  impose  themselves  on  the  sur- 
rounding population  as  m6re  noble  than  the  patois. 
Thus  a  linguistic  province  is  created,  and  its  dia- 
lect tends  constantly  to  crush  out  the  various 
patois  once  freely  used  within  its  boundaries. 

In  time  one  of  these  provinces  becomes  politi- 
cally more  powerful  than  the  others  and  extends 
its  rule  over  one  after  another  of  them.  As  it 
does  this,  its  dialect  replaces  the  dialects  of  the 
provinces  as  the  official  tongue,  and  it  tends  'con- 
stantly to  crush  out  these  other  dialects,  as  they 
had  tended  constantly  to  crush  out  the  various 
patois.  Thus  the  local  speech  of  the  population 
of  the  tiny  island  in  the  Seine,  which  is  the 
nucleus  of  the  city  of  Paris,  rose  slowly  to  the 
dignity  of  a  written  dialect,  and  the  local  speech 
of  each  of  the  neighboring  villages  sank  into  a 
patois— altho  originally  it  was  in  no  wise  in- 

53 


THE   ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES 

ferior.  In  the  course  of  centuries  Paris  became 
the  capital  of  France,  and  its  provincial  dialect 
became  the  official  language  of  the  kingdom. 
When  the  kings  of  France  extended  their  rule 
over  Normandy  and  over  Burgundy  and  over 
Provence,  the  Parisian  dialect  succeeded  in  impos- 
ing itself  upon  the  inhabitants  of  those  provinces 
as  superior;  and  in  time  the  Norman  dialect  and 
the  Burgundian  and  the  Provencal  were  ousted. 

The  dialect  of  the  province  in  which  the  king 
dwelt  and  in  which  the  business  of  governing 
was  carried  on,  could  not  but  dispossess  the  dia- 
lects of  all  the  other  provinces;  and  thus  the 
French  language,  as  we  know  it  now,  was  once 
only  the  Parisian  dialect.  Yet  there  was  ap- 
parently no  linguistic  inferiority  of  the  langue 
d'oc  to  the  langue  d'oil ;  and  the  reasons  for  the 
dominion  of  the  one  and  the  decadence  of  the 
other  are  purely  political.  Of  course,  as  the 
Parisian  dialect  grew  and  spread  itself,  it  was 
enriched  by  locutions  from  the  other  provincial 
dialects,  and  it  was  simplified  by  the  dropping  of 
many  of  its  grammatical  complexities  not  com- 
mon to  the  most  of  the  others. 

The  French  language  was  developed  from  one 
particular  provincial  dialect  probably  no  better 
adapted  for  improvement  than  any  one  of  half  a 
dozen  others;  but  it  is  to-day  an  instrument  of 
precision  infinitely  finer  than  any  of  its  pristine 

54 


THE   ENGLISH   LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES 

rivals,  since  they  had  none  of  them  the  good  for- 
tune to  be  chosen  for  development.  But  the 
patois  of  the  peasant  of  Normandy  or  of  Brittany, 
however  inadequate  it  may  be  as  a  means  of 
expression  for  a  modern  man,  is  not  a  corruption 
of  French,  any  more  than  Doric  is  a  corruption 
of  Attic  Greek.  It  is  rather  in  the  position  of  a 
twin  brother  disinherited  by  the  guile  of  his  fel- 
low, more  adroit  in  getting  the  good  will  of  their 
parents.  It  was  the  literary  skill  of  the  Athe- 
nians themselves,  and  not  the  superiority  of  the 
original  dialect,  that  makes  us  think  of  Attic 
as  the  only  genuine  Greek,  just  as  it  was  the 
prowess  of  the  Romans  in  war  and  their  power 
of  governing  which  raised  their  provincial  dialect 
into  the  language  of  Italy,  and  then  carried  it 
triumphant  to  every  shore  of  the  Mediterranean. 
The  history  of  the  development  of  the  English 
language  is  like  the  history  of  the  development 
of  Greek  and  Latin  and  French;  and  the  English 
language  as  we  speak  it  to-day  is  a  growth  from 
the  Midland  dialect,  itself  the  victor  of  a  struggle 
for  survivorship  with  the  Southern  and  Northern 
dialects.  "  With  the  accession  of  the  royal  house 
of  Wessex  to  the  rule  of  Teutonic  England,"  so 
Professor  Lounsbury  tells  us,  "the  dialect  of 
Wessex  had  become  the  cultivated  language  of 
the  whole  people— the  language  in  which  books 
were  written  and  laws  were  published."  But 
55 


THE   ENGLISH   LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED  STATES 

when  the  Norman  conquest  came,  altho,  to 
quote  from  Professor  Lounsbury  again,  "the 
native  tongue  continued  to  be  spoken  by  the 
great  majority  of  the  population,  it  went  out  of 
use  as  the  language  of  high  culture, "  and  "  the  edu- 
cated classes,  whether  lay  or  ecclesiastical,  pre- 
ferred to  write  either  in  Latin  or  in  French — the 
latter  steadily  tending  more  and  more  to  become 
the  language  of  literature  as  well  as  of  polite 
society. "  And  as  a  result  of  this  the  West-Saxon 
had  to  drop  to  the  low  level  of  the  other  dialects ; 
"it  had  no  longer  any  preeminence  of  its  own." 
There  was  in  England  from  the  twelfth  to  the 
fourteenth  centuries  no  national  language,  but 
every  one  was  free  to  use  with  tongue  and  pen 
his  own  local  speech,  altho  three  provincial 
dialects  existed,  "  each  possessing  a  literature  of 
its  own  and  each  seemingly  having  about  the 
same  chance  to  be  adopted  as  the  representative 
national  speech." 

These  three  dialects  were  the  Southern  (which 
was  the  descendant  of  Wessex,  once  on  the  way 
to  supremacy),  the  Northern,  and  the  Midland 
(which  had  the  sole  advantage  that  it  was  a  com- 
promise between  its  neighbors  to  the  north  and 
the  south).  London  was  situated  in  the  region 
of  the  Midland  dialect,  and  it  was  therefore  "  the 
tongue  mainly  employed  at  the  court"  when 
French  slowly  ceased  to  be  the  language  of  the 
56 


THE    ENGLISH    LANGUAGE    IN   THE   UNITED   STATES 

upper  classes.  As  might  be  expected  in  those 
days  before  the  printing-press  and  the  spelling- 
book  imposed  uniformity,  the  Midland  dialect 
was  spoken  somewhat  differently  in  the  Eastern 
counties  from  the  way  it  was  spoken  in  the 
Western  counties  of  the  region.  London  was  in 
the  Eastern  division  of  the  Midland  dialect,  and 
London  was  the  capital.  Probably  because  the 
speech  of  the  Eastern  division  of  the  Midland  dia- 
lect was  the  speech  of  the  capital,  it  was  used  as 
the  vehicle  of  his  verse  by  an  officer  of  the  court 
—who  happened  also  to  be  a  great  poet  and  a 
great  literary  artist.  Just  as  Dante's  choice  of  his 
native  Tuscan  dialect  controlled  the  future  de- 
velopment of  Italian,  so  Chaucer's  choice  con- 
trolled the  future  development  of  English.  It 
was  Chaucer,  so  Professor  Lounsbury  declares, 
"  who  first  showed  to  all  men  the  resources  of 
the  language,  its  capacity  of  representing  with 
discrimination  all  shades  of  human  thought  and 
of  conveying  with  power  all  manifestations  of 
human  feeling." 

The  same  writer  tells  us  that  "  the  cultivated 
English  language,  in  which  nearly  all  English 
literature  of  value  has  been  written,  sprang 
directly  from  the  East-Midland  division  of  the 
Midland  dialect,  and  especially  from  the  variety 
of  the  East-Midland  which  was  spoken  at  Lon- 
don and  the  region  immediately  to  the  north  of 

57 


THE   ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES 

it."  That  this  magnificent  opportunity  came  to 
the  London  dialect  was  not  due  to  any  superiority 
it  had  over  any  other  variety  of  the  Midland  dia- 
lect: it  was  due  to  the  single  fact  that  it  was  the 
speech  of  the  capital— just  as  the  dialect  of  the 
Ile-de-France  in  like  manner  served  as  the  stem 
from  which  the  cultivated  French  language 
sprang.  The  Parisian  dialect  flourished  and  im- 
posed itself  on  all  sides;  within  the  present  limits 
of  France  it  choked  out  the  other  local  dialects, 
even  the  soft  and  lovely  Provencal ;  and  beyond 
the  boundaries  of  the  country  it  was  accepted 
in  Belgium  and  in  Switzerland. 

So  the  dialect  of  London  has  gone  on  growing 
and  refining  and  enriching  itself  as  the  people 
who  spoke  it  extended  their  borders  and  passed 
over  the  wide  waters  and  won  their  way  to  far 
countries,  until  to-day  it  serves  not  merely  for  the 
cockney  Tommy  Atkins,  the  cow-boy  of  Mon- 
tana, and  the  larrikin  of  Melbourne:  it  is  ade- 
quate for  the  various  needs  of  the  Scotch  philoso- 
pher and  of  the  American  humorist ;  it  is  employed 
by  the  Viceroy  of  India,  the  Sirdar  of  Egypt,  the 
governor  of  Alaska,  and  the  general  in  command 
over  the  Philippines.  In  the  course  of  some  six 
centuries  the  dialect  of  a  little  town  on  the 
Thames  has  become  the  mother-tongue  of  mil- 
lions and  millions  of  people  scattered  broadcast 
over  the  face  of  the  earth. 
58 


THE   ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES 

If  the  Norman  conquest  had  not  taken  place 
the  history  of  the  English  race  would  be  very 
different,  and  the  English  language  would  not  be 
what  it  is,  since  it  would  have  had  for  its  root 
the  Wessex  variety  of  the  Southern  dialect.  But 
the  Norman  conquest  did  take  place,  and  the 
English  language  has  for  its  root  the  Eastern 
division  of  the  Midland  dialect.  The  Norman 
conquest  it  was  which  brought  the  modest  but 
vigorous  young  English  tongue  into  close  contact 
with  the  more  highly  cultivated  French.  The 
French  spoken  in  England  was  rather  the  Nor- 
man dialect  than  the  Parisian  (which  is  the  true 
root  of  modern  French),  and  whatever  slight  in- 
fluence English  may  have  had  upon  it  does  not 
matter  now,  for  it  was  destined  to  a  certain 
death.  But  this  Norman-French  enlarged  the 
plastic  English  speech  against  which  it  was  press- 
ing; and  English  adopted  many  French  words, 
not  borrowing  them,  but  making  them  our  own, 
once  for  all,  and  not  dropping  the  original  English 
word,  but  keeping  both  with  slight  divergence  of 
meaning. 

Thus  it  is  in  part  to  the  Norman  conquest  that 
we  owe  the  double  vocabulary  wherein  our  lan- 
guage surpasses  all  others.  While  the  frame- 
work of  English  is  Teutonic,  we  have  for  many 
things  two  names,  one  of  Germanic  origin  and 
one  of  Romance.  Our  direct,  homely  words, 


THE   ENGLISH   LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES 

that  go  straight  to  our  hearts  and  nestle  there— 
these  are  most  of  them  Teutonic.  Our  more 
delicate  words,  subtle  in  finer  shades  of  mean- 
ing— these  often  come  to  us  from  the  Latin 
through  the  French.  The  secondary  words  are 
of  Romance  origin,  and  the  primary  words  of 
Germanic.  And  this— if  the  digression  may  here 
be  hazarded— is  one  reason  why  French  poetry 
touches  us  less  than  German,  the  words  of  the 
former  seeming  to  us  remote,  not  to  say  sophis- 
ticated, while  the  words  of  the  latter  are  akin  to 
our  own  simpler  and  swifter  words. 

One  other  advantage  of  the  pressure  of  French 
upon  English  in  the  earlier  stages  of  its  develop- 
ment, when  it  was  still  ductile,  was  that  this 
pressure  helped  us  to  our  present  grammatical 
simplicity.  Whenever  the  political  intelligence 
of  the  inhabitants  of  the  capital  of  a  district 
raises  the  local  dialect  to  a  position  of  supremacy, 
so  that  it  spreads  over  the  surrounding  districts 
and  casts  their  dialects  into  the  shadow,  the 
dominant  dialect  is  likely  to  lose  those  of  its 
grammatical  peculiarities  not  to  be  found  also  in 
the  other  dialects.  Whatever  is  common  to 
them  all  is  pretty  sure  to  survive,  and  what  is 
not  common  may  or  may  not  be  given  up.  The 
London  dialect,  in  its  development,  felt  the  in- 
fluence, not  only  of  the  other  division  of  the 
Midland  dialect,  and  of  the  two  rival  dialects, 
60 


THE   ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES 

one  to  the  north  of  it  and  the  other  to  the  south, 
but  also  of  a  foreign  tongue  spoken  by  all  who 
pretended  to  any  degree  of  culture.  This  attri- 
tion helped  English  to  shed  many  minor  gram- 
matical complexities  still  retained  by  languages 
which  had  not  this  fortunate  experience  in  their 
youth. 

Perhaps  the  late  Richard  Grant  White  was 
going  a  little  too  far  when  he  asserted  that  Eng- 
lish was  a  grammarless  tongue;  but  it  cannot  be 
denied  that  English  is  less  infested  with  gram- 
mar than  any  other  of  the  great  modern  languages. 
German,  for  example,  is  a  most  grammarful 
tongue;  and  Mark  Twain  has  explained  to  us 
(in  '  A  Tramp  Abroad ')  just  how  elaborate  and 
intricate  its  verbal  machinery  is;  and  the  Vola- 
piik,  which  was  made  in  Germany,  had  the 
syntactical  convolutions  of  its  inventor's  native 
tongue. 

By  its  possession  of  this  grammatical  com- 
plexity, Volapiik  was  unfitted  for  service  as  a 
world-language.  A  fortunate  coincidence  it  is 
that  English,  which  is  becoming  a  world-language 
by  sheer  force  of  the  energy  and  determination 
of  those  whose  mother-speech  it  is,  should  early 
have  shed  most  of  these  cumbersome  and  re- 
tarding grammatical  devices.  The  earlier  phi- 
lologists were  wont  to  consider  this  throwing  off 
of  needless  inflections  as  a  symptom  of  decay. 
61 


THE   ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED  STATES 

The  later  philologists  are  coming  to  recognize  it 
as  a  sign  of  progress.  They  are  getting  to  regard 
the  unconscious  struggle  for  short-cuts  in  speech, 
not  as  degeneration,  but  rather  as  regeneration. 
As  Krauter  asserts,  "  The  dying  out  of  forms  and 
sounds  is  looked  upon  by  the  etymologists  with 
painful  feelings;  but  no  unprejudiced  judge  will 
be  able  to  see  in  it  anything  but  a  progressive 
victory  over  lifeless  material."  And  he  adds, 
with  terse  common  sense:  "Among  several 
tools  performing  equal  work,  that  is  the  best 
which  is  the  simplest  and  most  handy."  This 
brief  excerpt  from  the  German  scholar  is  bor- 
rowed here  from  a  paper  prepared  for  the  Modern 
Language  Association  by  Professor  C.  A.  Smith, 
in  which  may  be  found  also  a  dictum  of  the  Dan- 
ish philologist  Jespersen:  "The  fewer  and 
shorter  the  forms,  the  better;  the  analytic  struc- 
ture of  modern  European  languages  is  so  far  from 
being  a  drawback  to  them  that  it  gives  them  an 
unimpeachable  superiority  over  the  earlier  stages 
of  the  same  languages."  And  it  is  Jespersen 
who  boldly  declares  that  "  the  so-called  full  and 
rich  forms  of  the  ancient  languages  are  not  a 
beauty,  but  a  deformity." 

In  other  words,  language  is  merely  an  instru- 
ment for  the  use  of  man;   and  like  all  other  in- 
struments, it  had  to  begin  by  being  far  more 
complicated  than  is  needful.     The  watch  used  to 
62 


THE   ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES 

have  more  than  a  hundred  separate  parts,  and 
now  it  is  made  with  less  than  twoscore,  losing 
nothing  in  its  efficiency  and  in  precision.  Greek 
and  German  are  old-fashioned  watches;  Italian 
and  Danish  and  English  are  watches  of  a  later 
style.  Of  the  more  prominent  modern  languages, 
German  and  Russian  are  the  most  backward, 
while  English  is  the  most  advanced.  And  the 
end  is  not  yet,  for  the  eternal  forces  are  ever 
working  to  make  our  tongue  still  easier.  The 
printing-press  is  a  most  powerful  agent  on  the 
side  of  the  past,  making  progress  far  more  slug- 
gish than  it  was  before  books  were  broadcast;  yet 
the  English  language  is  still  engaged  in  sloughing 
off  its  outworn  grammatical  skin.  Altho  in  the 
nineteenth  century  the  changes  in  the  structure 
of  English  have  probably  been  less  than  in  any 
other  century  of  its  history,  yet  there  have  been 
changes  not  a  few. 

For  example,  the  subjunctive  mood  is  going 
slowly  into  innocuous  desuetude;  the  stickler  for 
grammar,  so-called,  may  protest  in  vain  against 
its  disappearance:  its  days  are  numbered.  It 
serves  no  useful  purpose;  it  has  to  be  laboriously 
acquired;  it  is  now  a  matter  of  rule  and  not  of 
instinct;  it  is  no  longer  natural:  and  therefore  it 
will  inevitably  disappear,  sooner  or  later.  Care- 
ful investigation  has  shown  that  it  has  already 
been  discarded  by  many  even  among  those  who 
63 


THE   ENGLISH   LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED  STATES 

are  very  careful  of  their  style— some  of  whom, 
no  doubt,  would  rise  promptly  to  the  defense  of 
the  form  they  have  been  discarding  uncon- 
sciously. One  authority  declares  that  altho  the 
form  has  seemed  to  survive,  it  has  been  empty 
of  any  distinct  meaning  since  the  sixteenth  cen- 
tury. 

This  is  only  one  of  the  tendencies  observable 
in  the  nineteenth  century;  and  we  may  rest  as- 
sured that  others  will  become  visible  in  the 
twentieth.  But  when  English  is  compared  with 
German,  we  cannot  help  seeing  that  most  of 
this  work  is  done  already.  Grammar  has  been 
stripped  to  the  bone  in  English;  and  for  us  who 
have  to  use  the  language  to-day  it  is  fortunate 
that  our  remote  ancestors,  who  fashioned  it  for 
their  own  use  without  thought  of  our  needs, 
should  have  had  the  same  liking  we  have  for  the 
simplest  possible  tool,  and  that  they  should  have 
cast  off,  as  soon  as  they  could,  one  and  another 
of  the  grammatical  complexities  which  always 
cumber  every  language  in  its  earlier  stages,  and 
most  of  which  still  cumber  German.  In  nothing 
is  the  practical  directness  of  our  stock  more 
clearly  revealed  than  in  this  immediate  beginning 
upon  the  arduous  task  of  making  the  means  of 
communication  between  man  and  man  as  easy 
and  as  direct  as  possible.  Doubly  fortunate  are 
we  that  this  job  was  taken  up  and  put  through 
64 


THE    ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   IN   THE    UNITED   STATES 

before  the  invention  of  printing  multiplied  the 
inertia  of  conservatism. 

It  was  the  political  supremacy  of  Paris  which 
made  the  Parisian  dialect  the  standard  of  French; 
and  it  was  the  genius  of  Dante  which  made  the 
Tuscan  dialect  the  standard  of  Italian.  That  the 
London  dialect  is  the  standard  of  English  is  due 
partly  to  the  political  supremacy  of  the  capital 
and  partly  to  the  genius  of  Chaucer.  As  the 
French  are  a  home-keeping  people,  Paris  has  re- 
tained its  political  supremacy;  while  the  English 
are  a  venturesome  race  and  have  spread  abroad 
and  split  into  two  great  divisions,  so  that  London 
has  lost  its  political  supremacy,  being  the  capital 
now  only  of  the  less  numerous  portion  of  those 
who  have  English  as  their  mother-tongue. 

It  is  true,  of  course,  that  a  very  large  propor- 
tion of  the  inhabitants  of  the  United  States,  how- 
ever independent  politically  of  the  great  empire 
of  which  London  is  the  capital,  look  with  affec- 
tion upon  the  city  by  the  Thames.  Their  feeling 
toward  England  is  akin  to  that  which  led  Haw- 
thorne to  entitle  his  record  of  a  sojourn  in  Eng- 
land '  Our  Old  Home.'  The  American  liking  for 
London  itself  seems  to  be  increasing;  and,  as 
Lowell  once  remarked,  "We  Americans  are  be- 
ginning to  feel  that  London  is  the  center  of  the 
races  that  speak  English,  very  much  in  the  sense 
that  Rome  was  the  center  of  the  ancient  world." 
65 


THE   ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES 

It  was  at  a  dinner  of  the  Society  of  Authors 
that  he»said  this,  and  he  then  added:  "I  confess 
that  I  never  think  of  London,  which  I  also  con- 
fess I  love,  without  thinking  of  the  palace  David 
built, '  sitting  in  the  hearing  of  a  hundred  streams ' 
—streams  of  thought,  of  intelligence,  of  activity." 

While  the  London  dialect  is  the  stem  from 
which  the  English  language  has  grown,  the  vo- 
cabulary of  the  language  has  never  been  limited 
by  the  dialect.  It  has  been  enriched  by  countless 
words  and  phrases  and  locutions  of  one  kind  or 
another  from  the  other  division  of  the  Midland 
dialect  and  from  both  the  Northern  and  the 
Southern  dialects— just  as  modern  Italian  has  not 
limited  itself  to  the  narrow  vocabulary  of  Flor- 
ence. Yet  in  the  earlier  stages  of  the  develop- 
ment of  English  the  language  benefited  by 
the  fact  that  there  was  a  local  standard.  The 
attempt  of  all  to  assimilate  their  speech  to  that 
of  the  inhabitants  of  London  tended  to  give  uni- 
formity without  rigidity.  As  men  came  up  to 
court  they  brought  with  them  the  best  of  the 
words  and  turns  of  speech  peculiar  to  their  own 
dialect;  and  the  language  gained  by  all  these 
accretions. 

Shakspere  contributed  Warwickshire  localisms 

not  a  few,  just  as  Scott  procured  the  acceptance 

of  Scotticisms  hitherto  under  a  ban.     As  Spenser 

had  gone  back  to  Chaucer,  so  Keats  went  to  the 

66 


THE   ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED  STATES 

Elizabethans  and  dug  out  old  words  for  his  own 
use;  and  William  Morris  pushed  his  researches 
farther  and  brought  up  words  almost  pre- 
Chaucerian.  Every  language  in  Europe  has  been 
put  under  contribution  at  one  time  or  another  for 
one  purpose  or  another.  The  military  vocabu- 
lary, for  instance,  reveals  the  former  superiority 
of  the  French,  just  as  the  naval  vocabulary  reveals 
the  former  superiority  of  the  Dutch.  And  as 
modern  science  has  extended  its  conquests,  it  has 
drawn  on  Greek  for  its  terms  of  precision. 

Under  this  influx  of  foreign  words,  old  and 
new,  the  framework  of  the  original  London  dia- 
lect stands  solidly  enough,  but  it  is  visible  only 
to  the  scholarly  specialist  in  linguistic  research. 
But  the  latest  London  dialect,  the  speech  of  the 
inhabitants  of  the  British  capital  at  the  end  of 
the  nineteenth  century,  has  ceased  absolutely  to 
serve  as  a  standard.  Whatever  utility  there  was 
in  the  past  in  accepting  as  normal  English  the 
actual  living  dialect  of  London  has  long  since 
departed  without  a  protest.  No  educated  Eng- 
lishman any  longer  thinks  of  conforming  his 
syntax  or  his  vocabulary  to  the  actual  living  dia- 
lect of  London,  whether  of  the  court  or  of  the 
slums.  Indeed,  so  far  is  he  from  accepting  the 
verbal  habits  of  the  man  in  the  street  as  suggest- 
ing a  standard  for  him  that  he  is  wont  to  hold 
them  up  to  ridicule  as  cockney  corruptions.  He 
67 


THE   ENGLISH   LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED  STATES 

likes  to  laugh  at  the  tricks  of  speech  that  he 
discovers  on  the  lips  of  the  Londoners,  at  their 
dropping  of  their  initial  b's  more  often  than  he 
deems  proper,  and  at  their  more  recent  substi- 
tution of  y  for  a— as  in  "tyke  the  cyke,  lydy." 

The  local  standard  of  London  has  thus  been 
disestablished  in  the  course  of  the  centuries  sim- 
ply because  there  was  no  longer  a  necessity  for 
any  local  standard.  The  speech  of  the  capital 
served  as  the  starting-point  of  the  language;  and 
in  the  early  days  a  local  standard  of  usage  was 
useful.  But  now,  after  English  has  enjoyed 
a  thousand  years  of  growth,  a  standard  so  primi- 
tive is  not  only  useless,  but  it  would  be  very 
injurious.  Nor  could  any  other  local  standard  be 
substituted  for  that  of  London  without  manifest 
danger— even  if  the  acceptance  of  such  a  standard 
was  possible.  The  peoples  that  speak  English 
are  now  too  widely  scattered  and  their  needs  are 
too  many  and  too  diverse  for  any  local  standard 
not  to  be  retarding  in  its  limitations. 

To-day  the  standard  of  English  is  to  be  sought 
not  in  the  actual  living  dialect  of  the  inhabitants 
of  any  district  or  of  any  country,  but  in  the  lan- 
guage itself,  in  its  splendid  past  and  in  its  mighty 
present.  Five  hundred  years  ago,  more  or  less, 
Chaucer  sent  forth  the  first  masterpieces  of  Eng- 
lish literature;  and  in  all  those  five  centuries  the 
language  has  never  lacked  poets  and  prose- 
68 


THE   ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES 

writers  who  knew  its  secrets  and  could  bring 
forth  its  beauties.  Each  of  them  has  helped  to 
make  English  what  it  is  now;  and  a  study  of 
what  English  has  been  is  all  that  we  need  to  en- 
able us  to  see  what  it  will  be— and  what  it  should 
be.  Any  attempt  to  trammel  it  by  a  local  stan- 
dard, or  by  academic  restrictions,  or  by  school- 
masters' grammar-rules,  is  certain  to  fail.  In  the 
past,  English  has  shaken  itself  free  of  many  a 
limitation;  and  in  the  present  it  is  insisting  on  its 
own  liberty  to  take  the  short-cut  whenever  that 
enables  it  to  do  its  work  with  less  waste  of  time. 
We  cannot  doubt  that  in  the  future  it  will  go  on 
in  its  own  way,  making  itself  fitter  for  the  mani- 
fold needs  of  an  expanding  race  which  has  the 
unusual  characteristic  of  having  lofty  ideals  while 
being  intensely  practical.  A  British  poet  it  was, 
Lord  Houghton,  who  once  sent  these  prophetic 
lines  to  an  American  lady: 

That  ample  speech !     That  subtle  speech ! 
Apt  for  the  need  of  all  and  each ; 
Strong  to  endure,  yet  prompt  to  bend 
Wherever  human  feelings  tend. 
Preserve  its  force;  expand  its  powers; 
And  through  the  maze  of  civic  life, 
In  Letters,  Commerce,  even  in  Strife, 
Forget  not  it  is  yours  and  ours. 

The  English   language  is  the  most  valuable 
possession  of  the  peoples  that  speak  it,  and  that 
69 


THE    ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED  STATES 

have  for  their  chief  cities,  not  London  alone,  or 
Edinburgh  or  Dublin,  but  also  New  York  and 
Chicago,  Calcutta  and  Bombay,  Melbourne  and 
Montreal.  The.  English  language  is  one  and  in- 
divisible, and  we  need  not  fear  that  the  lack  of  a 
local  standard  may  lead  it  ever  to  break  up  into 
fragmentary  dialects.  There  is  really  no  danger 
now  that  English  will  not  be  uniform  in  all  the 
four  quarters  of  the  world,  and  that  it  will  not 
modify  itself  as  occasion  serves.  We  can  already 
detect  divergencies  of  usage  and  of  vocabulary ; 
but  these  are  only  trifles.  The  steamship  and 
the  railroad  and  the  telegraph  bring  the  American 
and  the  Briton  and  the  Australian  closer  together 
nowadays  than  were  the  users  of  the  Midland 
dialect  when  Chaucer  set  forth  on  his  pilgrimage 
to  Canterbury ;  and  then  there  is  the  printing- 
press,  whereby  the  newspaper  and  the  school- 
book  and  the  works  of  the  dead-and-gone 
masters  of  our  literature  bind  us  together  with 
unbreakable  links. 

These  divergencies  of  usage  and  of  vocabulary 
—London  from  Edinburgh,  and  New  York  from 
Bombay— are  but  evidences  of  the  healthy  activ- 
ity of  our  tongue.  It  is  only  when  it  is  dead  that 
a  language  ceases  to  grow.  It  needs  to  be  con- 
stantly refreshed  by  new  words  and  phrases  as 
the  elder  terms  are  exhausted.  Lowell  held  it  to 
be  part  of  Shakspere's  good  fortune  that  he  came 
70 


THE   ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES 

when  English  was  ripe  and  yet  fresh,  when  there 
was  an  abundance  of  words  ready  to  his  hand, 
but  none  of  them  yet  exhausted  by  hard  work. 
So  Mr.  Howells  has  recently  recorded  his  feeling 
that  any  one  who  now  employs  English  "to  depict 
or  to  characterize  finds  the  phrases  thumbed  over 
and  worn  and  blunted  with  incessant  use,"  and 
experiences  a  joy  in  the  bold  locutions  which  are 
now  and  again  "  reported  from  the  lips  of  the 
people." 

"  From  the  lips  of  thepeople" ;  —here  is  a  phrase 
that  would  have  sadly  shocked  a  narrow-minded 
scholar  like  Dr.  Johnson.  But  what  the  learned 
of  yesterday  denied— and,  indeed,  have  de- 
nounced as  rank  heresy— the  more  learned  of 
to-day  acknowledge  as  a  fact.  The  real  language 
of  a  people  is  the  spoken  word,  not  the  written. 
Language  lives  on  the  tongue  and  in  the  ear; 
there  it  was  born,  and  there  it  grows.  Man 
wooed  his  wife  and  taught  his  children  and  dis- 
cussed with  his  neighbors  for  centuries  before  he 
perfected  the  art  of  writing.  Even  to-day  the 
work  of  the  world  is  done  rather  by  the  spoken 
word  than  by  the  written.  And  those  who  are 
doing  the  work  of  the  world  are  following  the 
example  of  our  remote  ancestors  who  did  not 
know  how  to  write;  when  they  feel  new  needs 
they  will  make  violent  efforts  to  supply  those 
needs,  devising  fresh  words  put  together  in 

7' 


THE  ENGLISH   LANGUAGE   IN  THE   UNITED  STATES 

rough-and-ready  fashion,  often  ignorantly.  The 
mouth  is  ever  willing  to  try  verbal  experiments, 
to  risk  a  new  locution,  to  hazard  a  wrenching  of 
an  old  term  to  a  novel  use.  The  hand  that 
writes  is  always  slow  to  accept  the  result  of  these 
attempts  to  meet  a  demand  in  an  unauthorized 
way.  The  spoken  language  bristles  with  innova- 
tions, while  the  written  language  remains  properly 
conservative.  Few  of  these  oral  babes  are  viable, 
and  fewer  still  survive;  while  only  now  and 
again  does  one  of  these  verbal  foundlings  come 
of  age  and  claim  citizenship  in  literature. 

In  the  antiquated  books  of  rhetoric  which  our 
grandfathers  handed  down  to  us  there  are  solemn 
warnings  against  neologisms— and  neologism 
was  a  term  of  reproach  designed  to  stigmatize  a 
new  word  as  such.  But  in  the  stimulating  study 
of  certain  of  the  laws  of  linguistics,  which  M. 
Breal,  one  of  the  foremost  of  French  philologists, 
has  called  'Semantics,'  we  are  told  that  to  con- 
demn neologisms  absolutely  would  be  most  un- 
fortunate and  most  useless.  "  Every  progress  in 
a  language  is,  first  of  all,  the  act  of  an  individual, 
and  then  of  a  minority,  large  or  small.  A  land 
where  all  innovation  should  be  forbidden  would 
take  from  its  language  all  chance  of  develop- 
ment." And  M.  Breal  points  out  that  language 
must  keep  on  transforming  itself  with  every  new 
discovery  and  invention,  with  the  incessant 
72 


THE   ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES 

modification  of  our  manners,  of  our  customs, 
and  even  of  our  ideas.  We  are  all  of  us  at  work 
on  the  vocabulary  of  the  future,  ignorant  and 
learned,  authors  and  artists,  the  man  of  the 
world  and  the  man  in  the  street;  and  even  our 
children  have  a  share  in  this  labor,  and  by  no 
means  the  least. 

Among  all  these  countless  candidates  for  lite- 
rary acceptance,  the  struggle  for  existence  is  very 
fierce,  and  only  the  fittest  of  the  new  words  sur- 
vive. Or,  to  change  the  figure,  conversation 
might  be  called  the  Lower  House,  where  all  the 
verbal  coinages  must  have  their  origin,  while 
literature  is  the  Upper  House,  without  whose 
concurrence  nothing  can  be  established.  And 
the  watch-dogs  of  the  treasury  are  trustworthy ; 
they  resist  all  attempts  of  which  they  do  not 
approve.  In  language,  as  in  politics,  the  power 
of  the  democratic  principle  is  getting  itself  more 
widely  acknowledged.  The  people  blunders 
more  often  than  not,  but  it  knows  its  own  mind; 
and  in  the  end  it  has  its  own  way.  In  language, 
as  in  politics,  we  Americans  are  really  conserva- 
tive. We  are  well  aware  that  we  have  the  right 
to  make  what  change  we  please,  and  we  know 
better  than  to  exercise  this  right.  Indeed,  we 
do  not  desire  to  do  so.  We  want  no  more 
change  in  our  laws  or  in  our  language  than  is 
absolutely  necessary. 

73 


THE   ENGLISH   LANGUAGE   IN   THE   UNITED   STATES 

We  have  modified  the  common  language  far 
less  than  we  have  modified  the  common  law. 
We  have  kept  alive  here  many  a  word  and  many 
a  meaning  which  was  well  worthy  of  preserva- 
tion, and  which  our  kin  across  the  seas  had 
permitted  to  perish.  Professor  Earle  of  Oxford, 
in  his  comprehensive  volume  on  '  English  Prose,' 
praises  American  authors  for  refreshing  old 
words  by  novel  combinations.  When  Mr.  W. 
Aldis  Wright  drew  up  a  glossary  of  the  words, 
phrases,  and  constructions  in  the  King  James 
translation  of  the  Bible  and  in  the  Book  of  Com- 
mon Prayer,  which  were  obsolete  in  Great  Britain 
in  the  sense  that  they  would  no  longer  naturally 
find  a  place  in  ordinary  prose-writing,  Professor 
Lounsbury  pointed  out  that  at  least  a  sixth  of 
these  words,  phrases,  and  constructions  are  not 
now  obsolete  in  the  United  States,  and  would 
be  used  by  any  American  writer  without  fear 
that  he  might  not  be  understood.  As  Lowell 
said,  our  ancestors  "  unhappily  could  bring  over 
no  English  better  than  Shakspere's,  '  and  by 
good  fortune  we  have  kept  alive  some  of  the 
Elizabethan  boldness  of  imagery.  Even  our 
trivial  colloquialisms  have  often  a  metaphoric 
vigor  now  rarely  to  be  matched  in  the  street- 
phrases  of  the  city  where  Shakspere  earned  his 
living.  Ben  Jonson  would  have  relished  one 
New  York  phrase  that  an  office-holder  gives  an 
74 


THE   ENGLISH   LANGUAGE   IN  THE   UNITED  STATES 

office-seeker,  "the  glad  hand  and  the  marble 
heart,"  and  that  other  which  described  a  former 
favorite  comedian  as  now  having  "a  fur-lined 
voice." 

When  Tocqueville  came  over  here  in  1831,  he 
thought  that  we  Americans  had  already  modified 
the  English  language.  British  critics,  like  Dean 
Alford,  have  often  animadverted  upon  the  deteri- 
oration of  the  language  on  this  side  of  the  Atlan- 
tic. American  humorists,  like  Mark  Twain,  have 
calmly  claimed  that  the  tongue  they  used  was 
not  English,  but  American.  It  is  English  as 
Mark  Twain  uses  it,  and  English  of  a  force  and 
a  clarity  not  surpassed  by  any  living  writer  of 
the  language;  but  in  so  far  as  American  usage 
differs  from  British,  it  was  according  to  the 
former  and  not  according  to  the  latter.  But  they 
differ  in  reality  very  slightly  indeed;  and  what- 
ever divergence  there  may  be  is  rather  in  the 
spoken  language  than  in  the  written.  That  the 
spoken  language  should  vary  is  inevitable  and 
advantageous,  since  the  more  variation  is  at- 
tempted, the  better  opportunity  the  language  has 
to  freshen  up  its  languishing  vocabulary  and  to 
reinvigorate  itself.  That  the  written  language 
should  widely  vary  would  be  the  greatest  of 
misfortunes. 

Of  this  there  is  now  no  danger  whatever,  and 
never  has  been.  The  settlement  of  the  United 
75 


THE   ENGLISH   LANGUAGE   IN  THE   UNITED  STATES 

States  took  place  after  the  invention  of  printing; 
and  the  printing-press  is  a  sure  preventive  of  a 
new  dialect  nowadays.  The  disestablishment 
of  the  local  standard  of  London  leaves  English 
free  to  develop  according  to  its  own  laws  and  its 
own  logic.  There  is  no  longer  any  weight  of 
authority  to  be  given  to  contemporary  British 
usage  over  contemporary  American  usage— ex- 
cept in  so  far  as  the  British  branch  of  English 
literature  is  more  resplendent  with  names  of  high 
renown  than  the  American  branch.  That  this  was 
the  case  in  the  nineteenth  century— that  the 
British  poets  and  prose-writers  outnumber  and 
outvalue  the  American— must  be  admitted  at 
once;  that  it  will  be  the  case  throughout  the 
twentieth  century  may  be  doubted.  And  when- 
ever the  poets  and  prose-writers  of  the  American 
branch  of  English  literature  are  superior  in  num- 
ber and  in  power  to  those  of  the  British  branch, 
then  there  can  be  no  doubt  as  to  where  the 
weight  of  authority  will  lie.  The  shifting  of  the 
center  of  power  will  take  place  unconsciously; 
and  the  development  of  English  will  go  on  just 
the  same  after  it  takes  place  as  it  is  going  on 
now.  The  conservative  forces  are  in  no  danger 
of  overthrow  at  the  hands  of  the  radicals,  whether 
in  the  United  States  or  in  Great  Britain  or  in  any 
of  her  colonial  dependencies. 
Perhaps  the  principle  which  will  govern  can 
76 


THE  ENGLISH   LANGUAGE   IN  THE   UNITED  STATES 

best  be  stated  in  another  quotation  from  M. 
Breal:  "The  limit  within  which  the  right  to  in- 
novate stops  is  not  fixed  by  any  idea  of  '  purity ' 
(which  can  always  be  contested) ;  it  is  fixed  by 
the  need  we  have  to  keep  in  contact  with  the 
thought  of  those  who  have  preceded  us.  The 
more  considerable  the  literary  past  of  a  people, 
the  more  this  need  makes  itself  felt  as  a  duty,  as 
a  condition  of  dignity  and  force."  And  there  is 
no  sign  that  either  the  American  or  the  British 
half  of  those  who  have  our  language  for  a  mother- 
tongue  is  in  danger  of  becoming  disloyal  to 
the  literary  past  of  English  literature,  that  most 
magnificent  heritage— the  birthright  of  both 
of  us. 
(1899) 


77 


IV 

THE  LANGUAGE  IN  GREAT 
BRITAIN 


THE   LANGUAGE   IN   GREAT   BRITAIN 

HpHERE  is  a  wide  gap  between  the  proverb 
1  asserting  that  "  figures  never  lie  "  and  the 
opinion  expressed  now  and  again  by  experts  that 
nothing  can  be  more  mendacious  than  statistics 
misapplied;  and  the  truth  seems  to  lie  between 
these  extreme  sayings.  Just  as  chronology  is 
the  backbone  of  history,  so  a  statement  of  fact 
can  be  made  terser  and  more  convincing  if  the 
figures  are  set  forth  that  illuminate  it.  If  we 
wish  to  perceive  the  change  of  the  relative  posi- 
tion of  Great  Britain  and  the  United  States  in  the 
course  of  the  centuries,  nothing  can  help  us  bet- 
ter to  a  firm  grasp  of  the  exact  facts  of  the  case 
than  a  comparison  of  the  population  of  the  two 
countries  at  various  periods. 

In  1700  the  inhabitants  of  Great  Britain  and 
Ireland  numbered  between  eight  and  nine  mil- 
lions, while  the  inhabitants  of  what  is  now  the 
United  States  were,  perhaps,  a  scant  three  hun- 
dred thousand.  In  1900,  the  people  of  the  Brit- 
ish Isles  are  reckoned  at  some  thirty-seven 

81 


THE   LANGUAGE   IN   GREAT   BRITAIN 

millions  more  or  less,  and  the  people  of  the 
United  States  are  almost  exactly  twice  as  many, 
being  about  seventy-five  millions.  To  project  a 
statistical  curve  into  the  future  is  an  extra-hazar- 
dous proceeding;  and  no  man  can  now  guess  at 
the  probable  population  either  of  the  United 
Kingdom  or  of  the  United  States  in  the  year 
2000;  but  as  the  rate  of  increase  is  far  larger  in 
America  than  in  England,  there  is  little  risk  in 
suggesting  that  a  hundred  years  from  now  the 
population  of  the  American  republic  will  be  at 
least  four  or  five  times  as  large  as  that  of  the 
British  monarchy. 

Just  as  the  center  of  population  of  the  United 
States  has  been  steadily  working  its  way  west- 
ward, having  been  in  1800  in  Maryland  and 
being  in  1900  in  Indiana,  so  also  the  center  of 
population  of  the  English-speaking  race  has  been 
steadily  moving  toward  the  Occident.  Just  as 
the  first  of  these  has  had  to  cross  the  Alleghanies 
during  the  nineteenth  century,  so  will  the  second 
of  them  have  to  cross  the  Atlantic  during  the 
twentieth  century.  Whether  this  latter  change 
shall  take  place  early  in  the  century  or  late,  is 
not  important;  one  day  or  another  it  will  take 
place,  assuredly. 

Inevitably  it  will  be  accompanied  or  speedily 
followed  by  another  change  of  almost  equal  sig- 
nificance. London  sooner  or  later  will  cease  to 

83 


THE   LANGUAGE   IN   GREAT   BRITAIN 

be  the  literary  center  of  the  English-speaking 
race.  For  many  centuries  the  town  by  the 
Thames  has  been  the  heart  of  English  literature; 
and  there  are  now  visible  very  few  signs  that  the 
days  of  its  supremacy  are  numbered.  Even  in 
the  United  States  to-day  the  old  colonial  attitude, 
not  yet  abandoned,  causes  us  Americans  often  to 
be  as  well  acquainted  with  second-rate  British 
authors  as  the  British  are  with  American  authors 
of  the  first  rank.  Yet  it  is  not  without  signifi- 
cance that  at  the  close  of  the  nineteenth  century 
the  two  most  widely  known  writers  of  the  lan- 
guage should  be  one  of  them  an  American  citizen 
and  the  other  a  British  colonial,  owing  no  local 
allegiance  to  London— Mark  Twain  and  Rudyard 
Kipling. 

The  disestablishment  of  London  as  the  literary 
center  of  English  will  be  retarded  by  various  cir- 
cumstances. Only  very  reluctantly  is  a  tradition 
of  preeminence  overthrown  when  consecrated 
by  the  centuries.  The  conditions  of  existence  in 
England  are  likely  long  to  continue  to  be  more 
favorable  to  literary  productivity  than  are  the 
conditions  in  America.  In  a  new  country  litera- 
ture finds  an  eager  rival  in  life  itself,  with  all  its 
myriad  opportunities  for  self-expression.  No 
paradox  is  it  to  say  that  more  than  one  American 
bard  may  have  preferred  to  build  his  epic  in  steel 
or  in  stone  rather  than  in  words.  The  creative 
83 


THE   LANGUAGE   IN   GREAT   BRITAIN 

imagination  has  outlets  here  denied  it  in  a  long- 
settled  community,  residing  tranquilly  in  a  little 
island,  where  even  the  decorous  landscape  seems 
to  belong  to  the  Established  Church.  But  the 
Eastern  States  are  already,  many  of  them,  as  or- 
derly and  as  placid  as  Great  Britain  has  been  for  a 
century.  The  conditions  in  England  and  in  Amer- 
ica are  constantly  tending  toward  equalization. 

A  time  will  come,  and  probably  long  before 
the  close  of  the  twentieth  century,  when  there 
will  be  in  the  United  States  not  only  several 
times  as  many  people  as  there  are  in  the  British 
Isles,  but  also  far  more  literary  activity.  Sooner 
or  later  most  of  the  leading  authors  of  English 
literature  will  be  American  and  not  British  in 
their  training,  in  their  thought,  in  their  ideals. 
That  is  to  say,  the  British  in  the  middle  of  the 
twentieth  century  will  hold  to  the  Americans 
about  the  same  position  that  the  Americans 
held  toward  the  British  in  the  middle  of  the 
nineteenth  century.  The  group  of  American 
authors  between  1840  and  1860  contained  Irving 
and  Cooper,  Emerson  and  Hawthorne,  Longfel- 
low and  Lowell,  Poe  and  Whitman  and  Thoreau. 
These  are  names  endeared  to  us  and  highly  im- 
portant to  us,  and  not  to  be  neglected  in  any 
consideration  of  English  literature;  but  it  is  fool- 
ish for  an  American  to  seek  to  set  them  up  as 
the  equal  of  the  British  group  flourishing  during 
84 


THE   LANGUAGE   IN   GREAT   BRITAIN 

the  same  score  of  years.  So  in  the  middle  of  the 
twentieth  century  the  British  group  will  probably 
not  lack  striking  individualities;  but,  as  a  whole, 
it  will  probably  be  surpassed  by  the  American 
group.  The  largest  portion  of  the  men  of  letters 
who  use  English  to  express  themselves,  as  well 
as  the  largest  body  of  the  English-speaking  race, 
will  have  its  residence  on  the  western  shore  of 
the  Western  Ocean. 

What  will  then  happen  to  the  English  lan- 
guage in  England  when  England  awakens  to  the 
fact  that  the  center  of  the  English-speaking  race 
is  no  longer  within  the  borders  of  the  little 
island  ?  Will  the  speech  of  the  British  sink  into 
dialectic  corruption,  or  will  the  British  resolutely 
stamp  out  their  undue  local  divergences  from  the 
normal  English  of  the  main  body  of  the  users  of 
the  language  in  the  United  States  ?  Will  they 
frankly  accept  the  inevitable  ?  Will  they  face 
the  facts  as  they  are  ?  Will  they  follow  the  lead 
of  the  Americans  when  we  shall  have  the  leader- 
ship of  the  language,  as  the  Americans  followed 
their  lead  when  they  had  it  ?  Or  will  they  insist 
on  an  arbitrary  independence,  which  can  have 
only  one  result— the  splitting  off  of  the  British 
branch  of  our  speech  from  the  main  stem  of  the 
language  ?  To  ask  these  questions  is  to  project 
an  inquiry  far  into  the  future,  but  the  speculation 
is  not  without  an  interest  of  its  own.  And 
85 


THE   LANGUAGE   IN   GREAT   BRITAIN 

altho  it  is  difficult  to  decide  so  far  in  advance 
of  the  event,  yet  we  have  now  some  of  the 
material  on  which  to  base  a  judgment  as  to  what 
is  likely  to  happen. 

Of  course,  the  question  is  not  one  to  be 
answered  offhand;  and  not  a  few  arguments 
could  be  brought  forward  in  support  of  the 
opinion  that  the  British  speech  of  the  future  is 
likely  to  separate  itself  from  the  main  body  of 
English  as  then  spoken  in  this  country.  In  the 
first  place,  England,  altho  it  has  already  ceased 
to  be  the  most  populous  of  the  countries  using 
English,  will  still  be  the  senior  partner  of  the 
great  trading-company  known  as  the  British 
Empire.  That  the  British  Empire  may  be  dis- 
solved is  possible,  no  doubt.  The  Australian 
colonies  have  federated;  and  having  formed  a 
strong  union  of  their  own,  they  may  prefer  to 
stand  alone.  South  Africa  may  follow  the  ex- 
ample of  Australia.  India  may  arise  in  the  might 
of  her  millions  and  cast  out  its  English  rulers. 
Canada  may  decide  to  throw  in  its  lot  with  the 
greater  American  republic.  But  each  of  these 
things  is  improbable;  and  that  they  should  all 
come  to  pass  is  practically  inconceivable.  All 
signs  now  seem  to  point  not  only  to  a  continu- 
ance of  the  British  Empire,  but  also  to  its  steady 
expansion.  London  is  likely  long  to  be  the  cap- 
ital of  an  empire  upon  which  the  sun  never  sets, 

86 


THE   LANGUAGE   IN   GREAT   BRITAIN 

an  empire  inhabited  by  men  of  every  color  and 
every  creed  and  every  language.  For  these  men 
English  must  serve  as  the  means  of  communica- 
tion one  with  another,  Hindu  with  Parsee,  Boer 
with  Zulu,  Chinook  with  Canuck. 

That  this  will  put  a  strain  on  the  language  is 
indisputable.  Wherever  any  tongue  serves  as  a 
lingua  franca  for  men  of  various  stocks,  there 
is  an  immediate  tendency  toward  corruption. 
There  is  a  constant  pressure  to  simplify  and  to 
lop  off  and  to  reduce  to  the  bare  elements.  The 
Pidgin-English  of  the  Chinese  coast  is  an  example 
of  what  may  befall  a  noble  language  when  it  is 
enslaved  to  serve  many  masters,  ignorant  of  its 
history  and  careless  of  its  idioms.  Mr.  Kipling's 
earliest  tales  are  some  of  them  almost  incompre- 
hensible to  readers  unacquainted  with  the  vocab- 
ulary of  the  competition-walla;  and  the  reports 
of  the  British  generals  during  the  war  with  the 
Boers  were  besprinkled  with  words  not  hitherto 
supposed  to  be  English. 

Some  observers  see  in  this  a  menace  to  the 
integrity  of  the  language,  a  menace  likely  to  be- 
come more  threatening  as  the  British  Empire 
spreads  itself  still  farther  over  the  waste  places 
of  the  earth.  But  is  there  not  also  a  danger  in 
the  integrity  of  English  close  at  home— in  Eng- 
land itself,  even  in  London,  and  not  afar  in  the 
remote  borders  of  the  Empire— the  danger  due 
87 


THE   LANGUAGE   IN   GREAT   BRITAIN 

to  the  prevalence  of  local  dialects  ?  To  the  stu- 
dent of  language  one  of  the  most  obvious  differ- 
ences between  Great  Britain  and  the  United  States 
lies  in  the  fact  that  we  in  America  have  really  no 
local  dialects  such  as  are  common  in  England. 
Every  county  of  England  has  an  indigenous  pop- 
ulation, whose  ancestors  dwelt  in  the  same  place 
since  a  time  whereof  the  memory  of  man  run- 
neth not  to  the  contrary;  and  this  indigenous 
population  has  its  own  peculiarities  of  pronuncia- 
tion, of  vocabulary,  and  of  idiom,  handed  down 
from  father  to  son,  generation  after  generation. 
But  no  one  of  the  United  States  was  settled 
exclusively  by  immigrants  from  a  single  English 
county;  and,  therefore,  no  one  of  these  local 
dialects  was  ever  transplanted  bodily  to  America. 
And  no  considerable  part  of  the  United  States 
has  a  stationary  population,  inbreeding  and  stag- 
nant and  impervious  to  outside  influences; 
indeed,  to  be  nomadic,  to  be  here  to-day  and 
there  to-morrow,  to  be  born  in  New  England,  to 
grow  up  in  the  middle  west,  to  be  married  in 
New  York,  and  to  die  in  Colorado— is  not  this  a 
characteristic  of  us  Americans  ?  And  it  is  a 
characteristic  fatal  to  the  development  of  real 
dialects  in  this  country  such  as  are  abundant  in 
England.  Of  course  we  have  our  local  peculi- 
arities of  idiom  and  of  pronunciation,  but  these 
are  very  superficial  indeed.  Probably  there  has 


THE    LANGUAGE   IN   GREAT   BRITAIN 

been  a  closer  uniformity  of  speech  throughout 
the  United  States  for  fifty  years  past  than  there 
is  even  to-day  in  Great  Britain,  where  the  York- 
shireman  cannot  understand  the  cockney,  and 
where  the  Scot  sits  silent  in  the  house  of  the 
Cornishman. 

This  uniformity  of  speech  throughout  the 
United  States  is,  perhaps,  partly  the  result  of 
Noah  Webster's  '  Spelling-Book.'  It  has  certainly 
been  aided  greatly  by  the  public-school  system, 
firmly  established  throughout  the  country,  and 
steadily  strengthening  itself.  The  school  system 
of  the  United  Kingdom  is  younger  by  far;  it  is 
not  yet  adequately  organized;  it  has  still  to  be 
adjusted  to  its  place  in  a  proper  scheme  of 
national  education.  In  the  higher  institutions  of 
learning  in  England,  at  Oxford  and  at  Cambridge, 
there  is  no  postgraduate  work  in  English;  and 
whatever  instruction  an  undergraduate  may  get 
there  in  English  literature  is  incidental,  not  to 
say  accidental. 

Probably  there  is  no  connection  between  this 
lack  of  university  instruction  in  English  and  a 
carelessness  in  the  use  of  the  language  which 
strikes  us  unpleasantly,  not  merely  in  the  unpre- 
meditated letters  of  scholarly  Englishmen,  but 
sometimes  even  in  their  more  academic  efforts. 
Jowett's  correspondence,  for  example,  and  Mat- 
thew Arnold's,  offer  examples  of  a  slovenliness 
89 


THE   LANGUAGE   IN   GREAT   BRITAIN 

of  phrase  not  to  be  found  in  Lowell's  letters  or 
in  Emerson's. 

Certain  Briticisms  are  very  prevalent,  not 
merely  among  the  uneducated,  but  among  the 
more  highly  cultivated.  Directly  is  used  for  as 
soon  as  by  Archbishop  Trench  (the  author  of  a 
lively  little  book  on  words)  and  by  Mr.  Court- 
hope  (the  Oxford  professor  of  poetry).  Like  is 
used  for  as— that  is,  "  like  we  do  "—by  Charles 
Darwin,  and  in  more  than  one  volume  of  the 
English  Men  of  Letters  series,  edited  by  Mr.  John 
Morley.  The  elision  of  the  initial  h,  which  the 
British  themselves  like  to  think  a  test  of  breeding, 
is  discoverable  far  more  often  than  they  imagine 
on  the  lips  of  those  who  ought  to  know  better. 
It  is  said  that  Lord  Beaconsfield,  for  example, 
sometimes  dropped  his  b's,  and  that  he  once 
spoke  of  "the  'urried  'Udson."  And  if  we  may 
rely  on  the  evidence  of  spelling,  the  British  often 
leave  the  h  silent  where  we  Americans  sound  it. 
They  write  an  historical  essay  from  which  it  is 
a  fair  inference  that  they  pronounce  the  adjective 
'istorical.  In  Mr.  Kipling's  '  From  Sea  to  Sea'  he 
writes  not  only  an  hotel  and  an  hospital,  but  also 
an  hydraulic. 

Thus  we  see  that  the  immense  size  and  varie- 
gated population  of  the  British  Empire  may  be 
considered  as  a  menace  to  the  integrity  of  the 
English  language  in  the  British  Isles;  and  that  a 
90 


THE   LANGUAGE   IN   GREAT   BRITAIN 

second  source  of  danger  is  to  be  discovered  in 
the  local  dialects  of  Great  Britain;  and,  finally, 
that  there  is  observable  in  England  even  now  a 
carelessness  in  the  use  of  the  language  and  a 
willingness  to  innovate  both  in  vocabulary  and 
in  idiom. 

But  however  formidable  these  three  tendencies 
may  look  when  massed  together,  there  is  really 
no  weight  to  be  attached  to  any  of  them  singly 
or  to  all  of  them  combined.  The  language  has 
already  for  two  centuries  been  exposed  to  con- 
tact with  countless  other  tongues  in  America  and 
Asia  and  Africa  without  appreciable  deterioration 
up  to  the  present  time;  and  there  is  no  reason  to 
fear  that  this  contact  will  be  more  corrupting  in 
the  twentieth  century  than  it  has  been  in  the 
nineteenth.  On  the  contrary,  it  will  result  rather 
in  an  enrichment  and  refreshment  of  the  vocabu- 
lary. The  danger  from  the  local  dialects  of  Great 
Britain,  instead  of  increasing,  is  decreasing  day  by 
day  as  the  facilities  for  travel  improve  and  as  the 
schoolmaster  is  able  to  impose  his  uniform  Eng- 
lish upon  the  young.  Lastly,  the  willingness  to 
use  new  words  not  authorized  by  the  past  of  the 
language  is  in  itself  not  blameworthy;  it  may  be 
indeed  commendable  when  it  is  restrained  by  a 
conservative  instinct  and  controlled  by  reason. 

The  Briticisms  that  besprinkle  the  columns  of 
London  newspapers  are  like  the  Americanisms  to 
9« 


THE   LANGUAGE   IN   GREAT   BRITAIN 

be  seen  in  the  pages  of  the  New  York  news- 
papers in  that  they  are  evidences  of  vitality,  of  the 
healthiness  of  the  language  itself.  In  Latin  it  may 
be  proper  enough  for  us  to  set  up  a  Ciceronian 
standard  and  to  reject  any  usage  not  warranted 
by  the  masterly  orator;  but  in  English  it  is  absurd 
to  declare  any  merely  personal  standard  and  to 
reject  any  term  or  any  idiom  because  it  was  un- 
known to  Chaucer  or  to  Shakspere,  to  Addison 
or  to  Franklin,  to  Thackeray  or  to  Hawthorne. 
Latin  is  dead,  and  the  Ciceronian  decision  as  re- 
gards the  propriety  of  any  usage  may  be  accepted 
as  final.  English  is  a  living  tongue,  and  the 
great  writers  of  every  generation  make  unhesi- 
tating use  of  words  and  of  constructions  which 
the  great  writers  of  earlier  generations  were 
ignorant  of  or  chose  to  ignore. 

The  most  of  these  British  innovations,  both  of 
to-day  and  of  to-morrow,  will  be  individual  and 
freakish ;  and,  therefore,  they  will  win  no  foot- 
hold even  in  the  British  vocabulary.  But  a  few 
of  them  will  prove  their  own  excuse  for  being, 
and  these  will  establish  themselves  in  Great 
Britain.  The  best  of  them,  those  of  which  the 
necessity  is  indisputable,  will  spread  across  the 
Atlantic  and  will  be  welcomed  by  the  main  body 
of  users  of  English  over  here— just  as  certain 
American  innovations  and  revivals  were  hospi- 
tably received  in  England  when  only  the  smaller 
92 


THE   LANGUAGE   IN   GREAT   BRITAIN 

branch  of  the  English-speaking  race  was  on  the 
American  side  of  the  ocean.  And,  of  course, 
the  new  terms  which  spring  into  existence  in  the 
United  States  after  the  literary  center  of  the  lan- 
guage has  crossed  the  Atlantic  will  be  carried 
over  to  England  in  books  and  in  periodicals. 

When  the  bulk  of  contemporary  English  liter- 
ature is  produced  by  American  authors,  and 
when  the  British  themselves  have  accepted  the 
situation  and  resigned  themselves  at  last  to  the 
departure  of  the  literary  supremacy  of  London, 
then  the  weight  of  American  precedent  will  be 
overwhelming.  Without  knowing  it,  British 
readers  of  American  books  will  be  led  to  conform 
to  American  usage;  and  American  terms  will  not 
seem  outlandish  to  them,  as  these  words  and 
phrases  do  even  now,  when  comparatively  few 
American  authors  are  read  in  Great  Britain.  And 
these  American  innovations  will  be  very  few,  for 
the  conservative  instinct  is  in  some  ways  stronger 
in  the  United  States  than  it  is  in  Great  Britain, 
due  perhaps  partly  to  the  more  wide-spread  pop- 
ular education  here,  which  gives  to  every  child  a 
certain  solidarity  with  the  past. 

It  is  education  and  the  school-book;  it  is  the 
printing-press  and  the  newspaper  and  the  maga- 
zine; it  is  the  ease  of  travel  across  the  Atlantic 
and  the  swiftness  of  the  voyage;— it  is  a  com- 
bination of  all  these  things  which  will  prevent 
93 


THE   LANGUAGE   IN   GREAT   BRITAIN 

any  development  of  a  British  branch  of  the  lan- 
guage after  the  numerical  preponderance  of  the 
American  people  becomes  overwhelming.  And 
working  toward  the  same  union  is  a  loyal  con- 
servatism, due  in  a  measure  to  a  proud  enjoy- 
ment of  the  great  literature  of  the  language,  the 
common  possession  of  both  British  and  Ameri- 
cans, having  its  past  in  the  keeping  of  the  elder 
division  of  the  stock,  and  certain  to  transfer  its 
future  to  the  care  of  the  younger  division. 

To  declare  that  the  literary  center  of  English  is 
to  be  transferred  sooner  or  later  from  the  British 
Isles  to  the  United  States  may  seem  to  some  a 
hazardous  prediction;  and  yet  it  is  as  safe  as 
any  prophecy  before  the  event  can  hope  to  be. 
Such  a  transfer,  it  is  true,  is  perhaps  unprece- 
dented in  literary  history,— altho  the  scholar 
may  see  a  close  parallel  in  the  preeminence  once 
attained  by  Alexandria  as  the  capital  of  Greek 
culture.  Unprecedented  or  not,  phenomenal  or 
not,  the  transfer  is  inevitable  sooner  or  later. 

(1899) 


94 


V 
AMERICANISMS  ONCE  MORE 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

IT  is  a  reflection  upon  what  we  are  wont  to  term 
a  liberal  education  that  the  result  of  college 
training  sometimes  appears  to  be  rather  a  nar- 
rowing of  the  mental  outlook  than  the  broadening 
we  have  a  right  to  anticipate.  What  a  student 
ought  to  have  got  from  his  four  years  of  labor  is 
a  conviction  of  the  vastness  of  human  know- 
ledge and  a  proper  humility,  due  to  his  discov- 
ery that  he  himself  possesses  only  an  infinitesi- 
mal fraction  of  the  total  sum.  Many  graduates 
—indeed,  most  of  them  nowadays,  we  may 
hope— have  attained  to  this  much  of  wisdom: 
that  they  are  not  puffed  up  by  the  few  things 
they  do  know,  so  much  as  made  modest  by  the 
many  things  they  cannot  but  admit  themselves  to 
be  ignorant  of.  With  the  increasing  specializa- 
tion of  the  higher  education,  the  attitude  of  the 
graduate  is  likely  to  be  increasingly  humble;  and 
a  college  man  will  not  be  led  to  feel  that  he  is 
expected  to  know  everything  about  everything. 
Perhaps  the  disputatious  arrogance  of  a  few  of 
97 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

the  younger  graduates  of  an  earlier  generation 
was  due  to  the  dogmatism  of  the  teaching  they 
sat  under.  In  nothing  is  our  later  instruction 
more  improved  than  in  the  disappearance  of  this 
authoritative  tone— due  in  great  measure,  it 
may  be,  to  the  unsettling  of  old  theories  by  new 
facts.  In  no  department  of  learning  was  the 
manner  more  dogmatic  than  in  the  teaching  of 
the  English  language.  The  older  rhetoricians 
had  no  doubts  at  all  on  the  subject.  They  never 
hesitated  as  to  the  finality  of  their  own  judgment 
on  all  disputed  points.  They  were  sure  that  they 
knew  just  what  the  English  language  ought  to 
be;  and  it  never  entered  into  their  heads  to  ques- 
tion their  own  competence  to  declare  the  stan- 
dard of  speech.  Yet,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  they 
knew  little  of  the  long  history  of  the  language, 
and  they  had  no  insight  into  the  principles  that 
were  governing  its  development.  At  most,  their 
information  was  limited  to  the  works  of  their 
immediate  predecessors ;  and  for  a  more  remote 
past  they  had  the  same  supreme  contempt  they 
were  ever  displaying  toward  the  actual  present. 
Thus  they  were  ever  ready  to  lay  down  rules 
made  up  out  of  their  own  heads;  and  their  acts 
were  as  arbitrary  as  their  attitude  was  intolerant. 
In  his  '  Philosophy  of  Rhetoric,'  which  he  tells 
us  was  planned  in  1750,  Dr.  George  Campbell 
quotes  with  approval  Dr.  Johnson's  assertion  that 
98 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

the  "  terms  of  the  laboring  and  mercantile  part  of 
the  people"  are  mere  "fugitive  cant,"  not  to  be 
"  regarded  as  part  of  the  durable  matter  of  a 
language."  Dr.  Campbell  himself  refuses  to 
consider  it  as  an  evidence  of  reputable  and  pres- 
ent use  that  a  word  or  a  phrase  has  been  em- 
ployed by  writers  of  political  pamphlets  or  by 
speakers  in  the  House  of  Commons,  and  he  de- 
clares that  he  has  selected  his  prose  examples 
"  neither  from  living  authors,  nor  from  those  who 
wrote  before  the  Revolution :  not  from  the  first, 
because  an  author's  fame  is  not  so  firmly  estab- 
lished in  his  lifetime;  nor  from  the  last,  that 
there  may  be  no  suspicion  that  his  style  is  su- 
perannuated. "  Now  contrast  this  narrow-minded- 
ness with  the  liberality  discoverable  in  our  more 
recent  text-books— in  the  '  Elements  of  Rhetoric,' 
for  example,  of  Professor  George  R.  Carpenter, 
who  tells  us  frankly  that  "  whenever  usage 
seems  to  differ,  one's  own  taste  and  sense  must 
be  called  into  play."  Professor  Carpenter  then 
pleads  "  for  a  considerable  degree  of  tolerance  in 
such  matters.  If  we  know  what  a  man  means, 
and  if  his  usage  is  in  accordance  with  that  of  a 
large  number  of  intelligent  and  educated  people, 
it  cannot  justly  be  called  incorrect.  For  lan- 
guage rests,  at  bottom,  on  convention  or  agree- 
ment, and  what  a  large  body  of  reputable  people 
recognize  as  a  proper  word  or  a  proper  meaning 
99 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

of  a  word  cannot  be  denied  its  right  to  a  place  in 
the  English  vocabulary." 

For  an  Englishman  to  object  to  an  American- 
ism as  such,  regardless  of  its  possible  propri- 
ety or  of  its  probable  pertinence,  and  for  an 
American  to  object  to  a  Briticism  as  such— either 
of  these  things  is  equivalent  to  a  refusal  to  allow 
the  English  language  to  grow.  It  is  to  insist 
that  it  is  good  enough  now  and  that  it  shall  not 
expand  in  response  to  future  needs.  It  is  to  im- 
pose on  our  written  speech  a  fatal  rigidity.  It  is 
an  attempt  on  the  part  of  pedants  so  to  bind  the 
limbs  of  the  language  that  a  vigorous  life  will 
soon  be  impossible.  With  all  such  efforts  those 
who  have  at  heart  the  real  welfare  of  our  tongue 
will  have  no  sympathy — least  of  all  the  strong 
men  of  literature  who  are  forever  ravenous  after 
new  words  and  old.  Victor  Hugo,  for  example, 
so  far  back  as  1827,  when  the  modern  science  of 
linguistics  was  still  in  its  swaddling-clothes,  had 
no  difficulty  in  declaring  the  truth.  "  The  French 
language,"  he  wrote  in  the  preface  to  '  Cromwell,' 
"  is  not  fixed,  and  it  never  will  be.  A  living  lan- 
guage does  not  fix  itself.  Mind  is  always  on  the 
march,  or,  if  you  will,  in  movement,  and  lan- 
guages move  with  it.  ...  In  vain  do  our  liter- 
ary Joshuas  command  the  language  to  stand  still; 
neither  the  language  nor  the  sun  stands  still  any 
more.  The  day  they  do  they  fix  themselves;  it 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

will  be  because  they  are  dying.  That  is  why 
the  French  of  a  certain  contemporary  school  is  a 
dead  language." 

In  the  'Art  of  French  Poetry,'  first  printed  in 
1565,  Ronsard,  one  of  the  most  adroit  of  Vic- 
tor Hugo's  predecessors  in  the  mastery  of  verse, 
proffers  this  significant  advice  to  his  fellow- 
craftsmen  (I  am  availing  myself  of  the  satis- 
factory translation  of  Professor  B.  W.  Wells): 
"You  must  choose  and  appropriate  dexterously 
to  your  work  the  most  significant  words  of  the 
dialects  of  our  France,  especially  if  you  have  not 
such  good  or  suitable  words  in  your  own  dialect; 
and  you  must  not  mind  whether  the  words  are 
of  Gascony,  of  Poitiers,  of  Normandy,  Manche, 
or  Lyonnais,  as  long  as  they  are  good  and  signify 
exactly  what  you  want  to  say.  .  .  .  And  ob- 
serve that  the  Greek  language  would  never  have 
been  so  rich  in  dialects  or  in  words  had  it  not 
been  for  the  great  number  of  republics  that  flour- 
ished at  that  time,  .  .  .  whence  came  many  dia- 
lects, all  held  without  distinction  as  good  by  the 
learned  writers  of  those  times.  For  a  country 
can  never  be  so  perfect  in  all  things  that  it  can- 
not borrow  sometimes  from  its  neighbors." 

Here  we  have  Ronsard  declaring  clearly  that 
local  varieties  of  speech  are  most  useful  to  the 
common  tongue.  Indeed,  we  may  regard  the 
dialect  of  any  district  as  a  cache— a  hidden  store- 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

house — at  which  the  language  may  replenish 
itself  whenever  its  own  supplies  are  exhausted. 
Whoever  has  had  occasion  to  study  any  of  these 
dialects,  whether  in  Greek  or  in  French  or  in 
English,  must  have  been  delighted  often  at  the 
freshness  and  the  force  of  words  and  phrases 
unexpectedly  discovered.  Edward  Fitzgerald, 
the  translator  of  Omar  Khayyam,  made  an  affec- 
tionate collection  of  Suffolk  sea-phrases,  and 
from  these  a  dozen  might  be  culled,  or  a  score  or 
more,  by  the  use  of  which  the  English  language 
would  be  the  gainer.  Lowell's  loving  and 
learned  analysis  of  the  speech  of  his  fellow  New- 
Englanders  is  familiar  to  all  readers  of  the  '  Big- 
low  Papers.'  It  was  Lowell  also  who  has  left  us 
this  brilliant  definition:  "True  Americanisms  are 
self-cocking  phrases  or  words  that  are  wholly  of 
our  own  make,  and  do  their  work  shortly  and 
sharply  at  a  pinch." 

Characteristically  witty  this  definition  is,  no 
doubt,  but  not  wholly  adequate.  What  is  an 
Americanism  ?  And  what  is  a  Briticism  ?  Not 
long  ago  a  friendly  British  writer  rebuked  his 
fellow-countrymen  for  a  double  failing  of  theirs 
—for  their  twin  tricks  of  assuming,  first,  that 
every  vulgarism  unfamiliar  to  them  is  an  Ameri- 
canism, and  that  therefore,  and  secondly,  every 
Americanism  is  a  vulgarism.  In  the  mouths  of 
many  British  speakers  "  Americanism  "  serves  as  a 
1 02 


AMERICANISMS  ONCE   MORE 

term  of  reproach;  and  so  does  "  Briticism  "  in  the 
mouths  of  some  American  speakers.  But  this 
should  not  be;  the  words  ought  to  be  used  with 
scientific  precision  and  with  no  flush  of  feeling. 
Before  using  them,  we  must  ascertain  with  what 
exact  meaning  it  is  best  to  employ  them. 

An  American  investigator  gathered  together  a 
dozen  or  two  queer  words  and  phrases  that  he 
had  noted  in  recent  British  books  and  journals, 
and  as  they  were  then  wholly  unknown  to 
America,  he  branded  them  as  Briticisms,  only  to 
evoke  a  prompt  protest  from  Mr.  Andrew  Lang. 
For  the  stigmatized  words  and  phrases  Mr.  Lang 
proffered  no  defense;  but  he  boldly  denied  that 
it  was  fair  to  call  them  Briticisms.  True,  one  or 
another  of  them  had  been  detected  in  pages  of 
this  or  that  British  author.  Yet  they  were  not 
common  property:  they  were  individualisms; 
they  were  to  be  charged  against  each  separate 
perpetrator  and  not  against  the  whole  United 
Kingdom.  Mr.  Lang  maintained  that  when 
Walter  Pater  used  so  odd  a  term  as  evanescing, 
this  use  "  scarcely  makes  it  a  Briticism ;  it  was  a 
Paterism." 

This  is  a  plea  in  confession  and  avoidance, 
but  its  force  is  indisputable.  To  admit  it,  how- 
ever, gives  us  a  right  to  insist  that  the  same  jus- 
tice shall  be  meted  out  to  the  so-called  American- 
isms which  Mr.  Lang  has  more  than  once  held  up 
103 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

to  British  execration.  If  the  use  of  an  ill-made 
word  like  essayette  or  leaderette  or  sermonette  by 
one  or  more  British  writers  does  not  make  it  a 
Briticism  until  it  can  be  proved  to  have  come 
into  general  use  in  Great  Britain,  then,  of  course, 
the  verbal  aberrations  of  careless  Americans,  or 
even  the  freakish  dislocations  of  the  vocabulary 
indulged  in  by  some  of  our  more  acrobatic  hu- 
morists, does  not  warrant  a  British  writer  in 
calling  any  chance  phrase  of  theirs  an  Ameri- 
canism. Mr.  W.  S.  Gilbert  once  manufactured 
the  verb  "to  burgle,"  and  Mr.  Gilbert  is  a  British 
writer  of  good  repute ;  but  burgling  is  not  there- 
fore a  Briticism :  it  is  a  Gilbertism.  Mr.  Edison, 
an  inventor  of  another  sort,  once  affirmed  that  a 
certain  article  giving  an  account  of  his  kineto- 
phonograph  had  his  "entire  indorsation."  Ac- 
cording to  Mr.  Lang's  theory,  indorsation,  not 
being  in  use  generally  in  the  United  States,  is 
not  an  Americanism:  it  is  an  Edisonism. 

The  more  Mr.  Lang's  theory  is  considered,  the 
sounder  it  will  appear.  Individual  word-coinages 
are  not  redeemable  at  the  national  treasury  either 
in  the  United  Kingdom  or  in  the  United  States. 
Before  a  word  or  a  phrase  can  properly  be  called 
a  Briticism  or  an  Americanism  there  must  be 
proof  that  it  has  won  its  way  into  general  use  on 
its  own  side  of  the  Atlantic.  Right  away  for 
"  at  once  "  is  an  Americanism  beyond  all  dispute, 
104 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

for  it  is  wide-spread  throughout  the  United 
States ;  and  so  is  back  of  for  "  behind."  Directly 
for  "  as  soon  as  "  is  a  Briticism  equally  indispu- 
table; and  so  is  different  to  for  "  different  from.'' 
In  each  of  these  four  cases  there  has  been  a  local 
divergence  from  the  traditional  usage  of  the  Eng- 
lish language.  All  four  of  these  divergences  may 
be  advantageous,  and  all  four  of  them  may  even 
be  accepted  hereafter  on  both  sides  of  the  Atlan- 
tic; but  just  now  there  is  no  doubt  that  two  of 
them  are  fairly  to  be  called  Americanisms  and 
two  of  them  are  properly  to  be  recorded  as 
Briticisms. 

Every  student  of  our  speech  knows  that  true 
Americanisms  are  abundant  enough;  but  the 
omission  of  terms  casually  employed  here  and 
there,  seed  that  fell  by  the  wayside,  springing  up 
only  to  wilt  away— the  omission  of  all  individu- 
alisms  of  this  sort  simplifies  the  list  immensely, 
just  as  a  like  course  of  action  in  England  cuts 
down  the  number  of  Briticisms  fairly  to  be  cata- 
logued as  such.  It  must  be  remarked,  however, 
that  the  collecting  of  so-called  Americanisms  is  a 
pastime  that  has  been  carried  on  since  the  early 
years  of  the  nineteenth  century,  whereas  it  was 
only  in  the  closing  decades  of  that  century  that 
attention  was  called  to  the  existence  of  Briticisms, 
and  to  the  necessity  of  a  careful  collection  of 
them.  The  bulky  tomes  which  pretend  to  be 
105 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

'  Dictionaries  of  Americanisms  '  are  stuffed  with 
words  and  phrases  having  no  right  there. 

These  dictionaries  would  be  very  slim  if  they 
contained  only  true  Americanisms,  that  is  to  say, 
words  and  phrases  in  common  use  in  the  United 
States  and  not  in  common  use  in  the  United 
Kingdom.  Yet  they  would  be  slimmer  still  if 
another  limitation  is  imposed  on  the  use  of  the 
word.  Is  a  term  fairly  to  be  called  an  American- 
ism if  it  can  be  shown  to  have  been  formerly  in 
use  in  England,  even  though  it  may  there  have 
dropped  out  of  sight  in  the  past  century  or  two  ? 
Now,  everybody  knows  that  dozens  of  so-called 
Americanisms  are  good  old  English,  neglected  by 
the  British  and  allowed  to  die  out  over  there,  but 
cherished  and  kept  alive  over  here.  Such  is 
guess=" incline  to  think";  such  is  reali%e="lo 
make  certain  or  substantial";  such  is  reckon  = 
"consider"  or  "deem";  such  is  a  few=" a  lit- 
tle"; such  is  nights= "at  night";  and  such  are 
dozens  of  other  words  often  foolishly  animad- 
verted upon  as  indefensible  Americanisms,  and 
all  of  them  solidly  established  in  honorable  an- 
cestry. An  instructive  collection  of  these  survi- 
vals can  be  seen  in  Mr.  H.  C.  Lodge's  aptly  en- 
titled and  highly  interesting  essay  on  '  Shakspere's 
Americanisms.' 

It  is  with  an  amused  surprise  that  an  American 
in  his  occasional  reading  keeps  coming  across  in 
106 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

the  pages  of  British  authors  of  one  century  or  an- 
other what  he  had  supposed  to  be  Americanisms, 
and  even  what  he  had  taken  sometimes  for  mere 
slang.  The  cert  of  the  New  York  street-boy, 
apparently  a  contraction  of  certainly,  is  it  not 
rather  the  certes  of  the  Elizabethans  ?  And 
the  interrogative  bow  ?="  what  is  it  ?  "—a  usage 
abhorred  by  Dr.  Holmes, —this  can  be  discovered 
in  Massinger's  plays  more  than  once  ('  Duke  of 
Milan,'  iii.  3,  and  'Believe  as  You  List,'  ii.  2). 
"  I  'm  pretty  considerably  glad  to  see  you,"  says 
Manuel,  in  Colley  Gibber's  '  She  Would  and  She 
Would  Not.'  To  fire  otit="  expel  forcibly,"  is 
in  Shakspere's  Sonnets  and  also  in  '  Ralph  Rois- 
ter Doister '— altho,  perhaps,  with  a  slightly  dif- 
ferent connotation  from  that  now  obtaining  in 
America.  A  theatrical  manager  nowadays  likes 
to  have  the  first  performance  of  a  new  play  out 
of  town  so  that  he  can  come  to  the  metropolis 
with  a  perfected  work,  and  he  calls  this  trying  it 
on  tbe  dog ;  the  same  expression,  almost,  is  to  be 
found  in  Pope.  In  '  Pickwick,'  Sam  Weller  pro- 
poses to  settle  tbe  basb  of  an  opponent;  and  in 
'  Tess  of  the  Durbervilles '  we  find  down  to  the 
ground  used  as  a  superlative,  and  quite  in  our 
own  later  sense.  The  Southern  peart  is  in  '  Lor- 
na  Doone,'  and  the  Southwestern  dog-gone  it  is  in 
the  'Little  Minister.'  In  Mr.  Barrie's  story  also 
do  we  find  to  go  back  on  your  word ;  just  as  in 
107 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

Mr.  William  Watson's  '  Excursions  in  Criticism  ' 
we  discover  grit  =" staying  power"  or  "dog- 
gedness." 

Very  amusing  indeed  is  the  attitude  of  the 
ordinary  British  newspaper  reviewer  toward 
words  and  phrases  in  this  category.  Not  being 
a  scholar  in  English,  he  is  unaware  that  scholar- 
ship is  a  condition  precedent  to  judgment;  and 
he  is  swift  to  denounce  as  American  innovations 
terms  firmly  rooted  in  the  earlier  masters  of  the 
language,  while  he  passes  the  frequent  Briticisms 
in  the  pages  of  contemporary  London  writers 
without  a  hint  of  reproof.  From  a  British  author 
like  Rossetti  he  accepts  "the  gracile  spring," 
while  he  rejects  "gracile  ease"  in  an  American 
author  like  Mr.  Howells.  Behind  this  arrogant 
ignorance  is  to  be  perceived  the  assumption  that 
the  English  language  is  in  immediate  peril  of  dis- 
ease and  death  from  American  license  if  British 
newspapers  fail  to  do  their  duty.  The  shriller 
the  shriek  of  protest  is,  the  slighter  the  protester's 
competence  upon  the  question  at  issue.  No  out- 
cry against  the  deterioration  of  English  in  Amer- 
ica has  come  from  any  of  the  British  scholars  who 
can  speak  with  authority  about  the  language. 

What  we  Americans  have  done  is  to  keep  alive 
or  to  revive  many  a  good  old  English  term ;  and 
for  this  service  to  our  common  speech  our  British 
cousins  ought  to  be  properly  grateful.  We  must 

108 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

admit  that  words  and  phrases  and  usages  thus 
reinstated  are  not  true  Americanisms— however 
much  we  might  like  to  claim  them  for  our  very 
own.  We  have  already  seen  that  most  of  the 
individualisms  of  eccentric  or  careless  writers  are 
also  not  to  be  received  as  true  Americanisms. 
And  there  is  yet  a  third  group  of  so-called  Ameri- 
canisms not  fairly  entitled  to  the  name.  These 
are  the  terms  devised  in  the  United  States  to 
meet  conditions  unknown  in  England.  Here  is 
no  divergence  from  the  accepted  usage  of  the 
language,  but  a  development  of  the  common 
tongue  to  satisfy  a  new  necessity.  The  need  for 
the  new  word  or  phrase  was  first  felt  in  America, 
and  here  the  new  term  had  to  be  found  to  sup- 
ply the  immediate  want.  But  the  word  itself, 
altho  frankly  of  American  origin,  is  not  to  be 
styled  an  Americanism.  It  is  a  new  English 
word,  that  is  all— a  word  to  be  used  hereafter  in 
the  United  Kingdom  as  in  the  United  States.  It 
is  an  American  contribution  to  the  English  lan- 
guage; but  it  is  not  an  Americanism— if  we  limit 
Americanism  to  mean  a  term  having  currency 
only  in  North  America,  just  as  Briticism  means  a 
term  having  currency  only  in  the  British  Islands. 
The  new  thing  exists  now,  and  as  it  came  into 
existence  in  America,  we  stood  sponsors  for  it; 
but  the  name  we  gave  it  is  its  name  once  for  all, 
to  be  used  by  the  British  and  the  Australians 
109 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

and  the  Canadians  as  well  as  by  ourselves. 
Telephone,  for  example,  —both  the  thing  and  the 
word  are  of  American  invention,— is  there  any 
one  so  foolish  as  to  call  telephone  an  Americanism? 
These  American  contributions  to  the  English 
language  are  not  a  few.  Some  of  them  are  brand- 
new  words,  minted  at  the  minute  of  sudden  de- 
mand, and  well  made  or  ill  made,  as  chance  would 
have  it;  phonograph  is  one  of  these;  dime  is 
another;  and  typewriter  is  a  third.  Some  of 
them  are  old  words  wrenched  to  a  new  use, 
like  elevator  =  "storehouse  for  grain,"  and  like 
ticker  ="  telegraphic  printing-machine."  Some 
of  them  are  taken  from  foreign  tongues,  either 
translated,  like  statehouse  (from  the  Dutch),  or 
unchanged,  like  prairie  (from  the  French),  adobe 
(from  the  Spanish),  and  stoop  (from  the  Dutch). 
Some  of  them  are  borrowed  from  the  rude 
tongues  of  our  predecessors  on  this  continent, 
like  moccasin  and  tomahawk  and  wigwam.  To 
be  compared  with  this  last  group  are  the  words 
adopted  into  English  from  the  native  languages 
of  India— punka,  for  example.  And  I  make  no 
doubt  that  the  Australians  have  taken  over  from 
the  aborigines  round  about  them  more  than  one 
word  needed  in  a  hurry  as  a  name  for  something 
until  then  nameless  in  our  common  language 
because  the  something  itself  was  until  then  un- 
known or  unnoticed.  But  these  Australian  con- 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

tributions  to  English  cannot  be  called  Australian- 
isms  any  more  than  telephone  and  prairie  and 
wigwam  can  be  called  Americanisms. 

So  far  the  attempt  has  been  here  made  to  sub- 
tract from  the  immense  and  heterogeneous  mass 
of  so-called  Americanisms  three  classes  of  terms 
falsely  so  called:  first,  the  mere  individualisms, 
for  which  America  as  a  whole  has  a  right  to  shirk 
the  responsibility;  second,  the  survivals  in  the 
United  States  of  words  and  usages  that  happen 
to  have  fallen  into  abeyance  in  Great  Britain ;  and, 
third,  the  American  contributions  to  the  English 
language.  As  to  each  of  these  three  groups  the 
case  is  clear  enough;  but  as  to  a  fourth  group, 
which  ought  also  to  be  deducted,  one  cannot 
speak  with  quite  so  much  confidence. 

This  group  would  include  the  peculiarities  of 
speech  existing  sporadically  in  this  or  that  special 
locality  and  contributing  what  are  often  called 
the  American  dialects— the  Yankee  dialect  first 
of  all,  then  the  dialect  of  the  Appalachian  moun- 
taineers, the  dialect  of  the  Western  cow-boys,  etc. 
Are  these  localisms  fairly  to  be  classed  as  Ameri- 
canisms ?  The  question,  so  far  as  I  know,  has 
never  been  raised  before,  for  it  has  been  taken 
for  granted  that  if  any  such  things  as  American- 
isms existed  at  all,  they  could  surely  be  collected 
from  the  mouth  of  Hosea  Biglow.  And  yet  if 
we  pause  to  think,  we  cannot  but  admit  that  the 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE  MORE 

so-called  Yankee  dialect  is  local,  that  it  is  un- 
known outside  of  New  England,  and  that  a  ma- 
jority of  the  inhabitants  of  the  United  States  find 
it  almost  as  strange  in  their  ears  as  the  broad 
Scotch  of  Burns.  As  for  the  so-called  dialect  of 
the  cow-boy,  it  is  not  a  true  dialect  at  all ;  it  is 
simply  carelessly  colloquial  English  with  a  heavy 
infusion  of  fugitive  slang;  and  whatever  it  may 
be  in  itself,  it  is  local  to  the  cow-country.  The 
Appalachian  dialect  is  perhaps  more  like  a  true 
dialect;  but  it  is  even  less  wide-spread  than  either 
of  the  others  here  picked  out  for  consideration. 
No  one  of  these  three  alleged  dialects  is  in 
any  sense  national;  all  three  of  them  are  nar- 
rowly local— altho  the  New  England  speech  has 
spread  more  or  less  into  the  middle  west. 

Perhaps  some  light  on  this  puzzle  may  be  had 
by  considering  how  they  regard  a  similar  problem 
in  England  itself.  The  local  dialects  which  still 
abound  throughout  the  British  Isles  are  under 
investigation,  each  by  itself.  No  one  has  ever 
suggested  the  lumping  of  them  all  together  as 
Briticisms.  Indeed,  the  very  definition  of  Briticism 
would  debar  this.  What  is  a  Briticism  but  a  term 
frequently  used  throughout  Great  Britain  and  not 
accepted  in  the  United  States  ?  And  if  this  de- 
finition is  acceptable,  we  are  forced  to  declare 
that  an  Americanism  is  a  term  frequently  used 
throughout  the  United  States  and  not  accepted  in 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE    MORE 

Great  Britain.  The  terms  of  the  Yankee  dialect, 
of  the  Appalachian,  and  of  the  cow-boy,  are  lo- 
calisms; they  are  not  frequently  used  throughout 
the  United  States;  they  are  not  to  be  classed  as 
Americanisms  any  more  than  the  cockney  idioms, 
the  Wessex  words,  and  the  Yorkshire  phrases 
are  to  be  classed  as  Briticisms. 

It  is  greatly  to  be  regretted  that  Dr.  Murray 
and  Mr.  Bradley  and  the  other  editors  of  the  com- 
prehensive Oxford  Dictionary  have  not  been  so 
careful  as  they  might  be  in  identifying  the  local- 
ity of  American  dialectic  peculiarities.  They 
have  taken  great  pains  to  record  and  circumscribe 
British  dialectic  peculiarities;  but  they  are  in  the 
habit  of  appending  a  vague  and  misleading  (U.  S.) 
to  such  American  words  and  usages  as  they  may 
set  down.  It  is  to  be  hoped  that  they  may  here- 
after aim  at  a  greater  exactness  in  their  attribu- 
tions, since  their  present  practice  is  quite  mis- 
leading, as  it  often  suggests  that  a  term  is  a  true 
Americanism,  used  freely  throughout  the  United 
States,  when  it  is  perhaps  merely  an  individualism 
or  at  best  a  localism. 

Of  true  Americanisms  there  are  not  so  very 
many  left,  when  we  have  ousted  from  their 
usurped  places  these  four  groups  of  terms  having 
no  real  title  to  the  honorable  name.  And  true 
Americanisms  might  be  subdivided  again  into 
two  groups,  the  one  containing  the  American 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

terms  for  which  there  are  equivalent  Briticisms, 
thus  indicating  a  divergence  of  usage,  and  the 
other  including  only  the  words  and  phrases  which 
have  sprung  up  here  without  correlative  activity 
on  the  other  side  of  the  Atlantic. 

When  the  attempt  is  made  to  set  up  parallel 
columns  of  Briticisms  and  Americanisms,  each 
more  or  less  equal  to  the  other,  it  is  with  sur- 
prise that  we  discover  how  few  of  these  equiva- 
lencies there  are.  In  other  words,  the  variations 
of  usage  between  Great  Britain  and  the  United 
States  are  infrequent.  In  England  the  railway 
was  preceded  by  the  stage-coach,  and  in  America 
the  railroad  was  preceded  rather  by  the  river 
steamboat;  and  probably  this  accounts  for  the 
slight  differentiation  observable  in  the  vocabulary 
of  the  traveler.  But  this  is  not  the  reason  why 
we  in  America  make  misuse  of  a  French  word, 
dfyot,  while  the  British  prefer  the  Latin  word 
terminus,  —restricting  its  application  accurately  to 
the  terminal  station  of  a  line.  In  England  they 
name  him  a  guard  whom  we  in  America  name 
brakeman  or  trainman;  and  it  is  to  be  noted  that 
when  Stevenson  was  an  Amateur  Emigrant  he 
sought  to  use  the  word  of  the  country  and  so 
mentions  the  brakesman— thus  proving  again  the 
difficulty  of  attaining  exactness  in  local  usage. 
The  British  call  that  a  goods-train  which  we  call 
a  freight-train;  and  they  speak  of  a  crossing-plate 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

when  they  mean  what  we  know  as  a  frog.  In 
the  United  States  a  sleeping-car  is  often  termed 
a  sleeper,  whereas  in  Great  Britain  what  they  call 
a  sleeper  is  what  we  here  call  a  tie.  They  say  a  key- 
less watch  where  we  say  a  stem-winder.  They 
say  leader  where  we  say  editorial.  They  call  that 
a  lift  which  we  call  an  elevator;  and  we  call  him 
a  farm-hand  whom  they  call  an  agricultural 
laborer.  They  have  even  borrowed  one  Ameri- 
canism, caucus,  and  made  it  a  Briticism  by 
changing  its  meaning  to  signify  what  we  are 
wont  to  describe  as  the  machine  or  the  organi- 
^ation.  It  is  to  be  noted  also  that  corn  in  Eng- 
land refers  to  wheat  and  in  America  to  mai^e; 
and  that  in  Great  Britain  calico  is  a  plain  cotton 
cloth  and  in  the  United  States  a  printed  cotton 
cloth. 

This  list  of  correlative  Americanisms  and  Bri- 
ticisms might  be  extended,  of  course;  but  how- 
ever sweeping  our  investigations  may  be  we 
cannot  make  it  very  long.  Far  longer  is  the  list 
of  American  words  and  phrases  and  usages  for 
which  there  is  no  British  equivalent— far  too  long, 
indeed,  for  inclusion  in  this  essay.  All  that  can 
be  done  here  and  now  is  to  pick  up  a  surface 
specimen  or  two  from  the  outcroppings  to  show 
the  quality  of  the  vein.  For  instance,  the  vocabu- 
lary of  the  university  is  largely  indigenous— altho 
we  have  recently  borrowed  a  British  vulgarism, 
iij. 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

speaking  now  of  the  varsity  team  and  the  "varsity 
crew.  Campus  seems  to  be  unknown  to  the 
British,  and  so  does  sophomoric,  a  most  useful 
epithet  understood  at  once  all  over  the  United 
States.  Its  absence  from  the  British  vocabulary 
is  probably  due  to  the  fact  that  the  four-year 
course  of  the  old-fashioned  American  college  is 
unknown  in  England,  where  there  are  freshmen 
indeed,  but  no  sophomores. 

Going  out  from  the  academic  groves  to  the 
open  air  of  the  wider  West,  as  so  many  of  our 
college  graduates  do  every  year,  we  meet  with  a 
host  of  Americanisms  vigorous  with  the  free  life 
of  the  great  river  and  of  the  grand  mountains. 
But  is  bla^e—illo  mark  a  trail  through  the 
woods  by  chipping  off  bits  of  bark"— is  this  a 
true  Americanism  ?  Is  it  not  rather  an  American 
contribution  to  the  English  language  ?  Surely 
every  man  in  Africa  or  in  Asia  who  wishes  to 
retrace  his  path  through  a  virgin  forest  must 
needs  bla^e  his  way  as  he  goes.  But  shack 
="  a  cabin  of  logs  driven  perpendicularly  into  the 
ground  "—this  is  a  true  Americanism  undoubt- 
edly. And  its  compound  claim-shack  ="  a  shack 
built  to  hold  a  claim  on  a  preemption  "—this 
is  another  true  Americanism  likely  to  puzzle 
a  British  reader.  Even  preempt  and  preemp- 
tion are  probably  Americanisms  in  that  they 
have  with  us  a  meaning  somewhat  different  from 
116 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

that  they  may  have  on  the  other  side  of  the  At- 
lantic. Another  true  Americanism,  which  comes 
to  us  from  the  plains,  is  mavericks="the  un- 
branded  cattle  at  large  to  become  the  property 
of  the  first  ranch-owner  whose  men  may  chance 
upon  them."  And  ranch,  while  it  is  itself  a  con- 
tribution to  the  language,  has  usages  in  which  it 
is  an  Americanism  merely— as  in  the  Californian 
ben-ranch,  for  example. 

There  is  a  large  freedom  about  the  Western 
vernacular  and  a  swift  directness  not  elsewhere 
observable  in  the  English  language,  whether  in 
the  United  States  or  in  the  British  Empire.  These 
are  most  valuable  qualities,  and  they  are  likely  to 
be  of  real  service  to  English  in  helping  to  refresh 
the  jaded  vocabulary  of  more  scholarly  commu- 
nities. The  function  of  slang  as  a  true  feeder  of 
language  is  certain  to  get  itself  more  widely  re- 
cognized as  time  goes  on ;  and  there  is  no  better 
nursery  for  these  seedlings  of  speech  than  the 
territory  west  of  the  Mississippi  and  east  of  the 
Rockies.  To  say  this  is  not  to  say  that  there  are 
not  to  be  found  east  of  the  Mississippi  many  in- 
teresting locutions  still  inadequately  established 
in  the  language.  For  example,  there  are  three 
words  applied  to  the  same  thing  in  different  parts 
of  the  East;  perhaps  they  ought  to  be  styled  lo- 
calisms, but  as  they  would  be  comprehended  all 
over  the  United  States,  they  are  probably  entitled 
117 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

to  be  received  as  true  Americanisms— if,  on  the 
other  hand,  they  are  not  in  fact  good  old  English 
words.  A  pass  through  the  hills  is  often  called 
a  notch  in  the  White  Mountains,  a  clove  in  the 
Catskills,  and  a  gap  in  the  Blue  Ridge.  Yet 
even  as  I  write  this  I  have  my  doubts  as  to 
there  being  any  narrow  geographical  delimitation 
of  usage,  since  I  can  recall  a  Parker  Notch  in  the 
Catskills,  not  far  from  Stony  Clove  and  Kaaters- 
kill  Clove. 

One  of  the  best  known  of  true  Americanisms 
is  lumber ="  timber."  When  we  speak  of 
the  lumbering  industry  we  mean  not  only  the 
cutting  down  of  trees  and  their  sawing  up  into 
planks,  but  also  their  marketing.  From  the  ap- 
parent participle  lumbering  a  verb  has  been 
made  to  lumber— &  not  uncommon  process  in 
the  history  of  the  language,  one  British  analog 
being  the  making  of  the  verb  to  bant  from  the 
innocent  name  of  Mr.  Banting.  To  lumber  is 
apparently  now  used  in  the  sense  of  to  deforest, 
if  we  may  rely  on  a  newspaper  paragraph  which 
informed  us  that  a  certain  tract  of  twenty-five 
thousand  acres  in  the  Adirondacks  had  "  been 
lumbered,  but  not  in  such  a  way  as  to  injure  it 
for  a  park."  The  verb  to  launder  ="  to  wash," 
has  been  revived  of  late  in  America,  if  indeed  it 
has  not  been  made  anew  from  the  noun  laundry  ; 
and  shirt-makers  in  their  price-lists  specify  whe- 

118 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

ther  the  shirts  are  to  be  sold  laundered  or  un- 
laundered.  And  to  the  word  laundry  itself  has 
been  given  a  further  extension  of  meaning.  In 
New  York,  at  least, —and  the  verbal  fashions  of 
the  metropolis  spread  swiftly  throughout  the 
Union,— it  signifies  not  only  the  place  where 
personal  linen  is  washed  but  the  personal  linen 
itself.  An  advertisement  in  a  college  magazine 
informed  the  lone  student  that  "  gentlemen's 
laundry"  was  "mended  free." 

When  an  American  student  of  English  printed 
a  collection  of  Briticisms  in  which  more  than  one 
strange  wild  fowl  of  speech  had  been  snared  on 
the  wing  in  newspapers  and  advertisements,  Mr. 
Andrew  Lang  protested  against  the  acceptance  of 
phrases  so  gathered  as  representative  Briticisms; 
and  it  is  only  fair  to  admit  that  they  represented 
colloquial  or  industrial  rather  than  literary  usage. 
Yet  they  were  interesting  in  that  they  gave  us  a 
glimpse  of  the  actual  speech  of  the  common  peo- 
ple—just such  a  glimpse,  in  fact,  as  we  get  from 
the  Roman  inscriptions.  This  actual  speech  of 
the  people,  whether  in  Rome  or  in  London  or  in 
New  York,  is  the  real  language,  of  which  the 
literary  dialect  is  but  a  sublimation.  Language 
is  born  in  the  mouth,  altho  it  dies  young  un- 
less it  is  brought  up  by  hand.  Language  is  made 
sometimes  in  the  library,  it  is  true,  and  in  the 
parlor  also,  but  far  more  often  in  the  workshop 
119 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

and  on  the  sidewalk;  and  nowadays  the  news- 
paper and  the  advertisement  record  for  us  the 
simple  and  unstilted  phrases  of  the  workshop 
and  the  sidewalk. 

The  most  of  these  will  fade  out  of  sight  unre- 
gretted;  but  a  few  will  prove  themselves  pos- 
sessed of  sturdy  vitality.  Briticisms,  it  may  be, 
or  Americanisms,  as  it  happens,  they  will  fight 
their  way  up  from  the  workshop  to  the  library, 
from  the  sidewalk  to  the  study.  Born  in  a  single 
city,  they  will  serve  usefully  throughout  a  great 
nation,  and  perhaps  in  the  end  all  over  the  world, 
wherever  our  language  is  spoken. 

The  ideal  of  style,  so  it  has  been  tersely  put, 
is  the  speech  of  the  people  in  the  mouth  of  the 
scholar.  One  reason  why  so  much  of  the  aca- 
demic writing  of  educated  men  is  arid  is  because 
it  is  as  remote  as  may  be  from  the  speech  of  the 
people.  One  reason  why  Mark  Twain  and  Rud- 
yard  Kipling  are  now  the  best-beloved  authors  of 
the  English  language  is  because  they  have  each 
of  them  a  welcome  ear  for  the  speech  of  the 
people.  Mark  Twain  abounds  in  true  American- 
isms ;  on  the  other  hand,  Rudyard  Kipling  is  spar- 
ing of  real  Briticisms— having,  indeed,  a  certain 
hankering  after  Americanisms.  Kipling's  case  is 
not  unlike  that  of  y^Eschylus,  who  was  a  native 
of  Greece  but  a  frequent  resident  in  Sicily,  and  in 
whose  vocabulary  occasional  Sicilianisms  have 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

been  found  by  the  keen-eyed  German  critics. 
So  Plautus  greedily  availed  himself  of  the  vigor- 
ous fertility  he  discovered  in  the  vocabulary  of 
the  Roman  populace;  and  when  Cicero  went  to 
the  works  of  Plautus  for  the  words  he  needed, 
we  had  once  more  the  speech  of  the  people  in 
the  mouth  of  the  scholar. 

Something  of  the  toploftiness  of  the  elder  rheto- 
ricians yet  lingers  in  the  tone  many  British  writers 
of  to-day  see  fit  to  adopt  whenever  they  take  oc- 
casion to  discuss  the  use  of  the  English  language 
here  in  America.  A  trenchant  critic  like  Mr. 
Frederic  Harrison,  in  a  lecture  on  the  masters  of 
style,  went  out  of  his  way  to  warn  his  hearers 
that  though  they  might  be  familiar  in  their  writ- 
ing they  were  by  no  means  to  be  vulgar.  "  At 
any  rate,  be  easy,  colloquial  if  you  like,  but  shun 
those  vocables  which  come  to  us  across  the  At- 
lantic, or  from  Newmarket  and  Whitechapel." 
This  linking  of  America  and  Whitechapel  may 
seem  to  us  to  be  rather  vulgar  than  familiar;  and 
it  was  Goethe— a  master  of  style  well  known  to 
Mr.  Harrison— who  reminded  us  that  "  when 
self-esteem  expresses  itself  in  contempt  of  an- 
other, be  he  the  meanest,  it  must  be  repellant." 
It  is  only  fair  to  say  that  fewer  British  writers 
than  ever  before  sink  to  so  low  a  level  as  this; 
and  it  is  right  to  admit  that  a  definite  recognition 
of  the  American  joint-ownership  of  the  Eng- 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

lish  language  is  not  now  so  rare  as  once  it  was 
in  England. 

Not  often,  however,  do  we  find  so  frank  and 
ungrudging  acknowledgment  of  the  exact  truth 
as  is  to  be  found  in  Mr.  William  Archer's  '  Amer- 
ica To-day.'  Part  of  one  of  the  Scotch  critic's 
paragraphs  calls  for  quotation  here  because  it 
sets  forth,  perhaps  more  clearly  and  concisely 
than  any  American  has  yet  dared  to  do,  what  the 
facts  of  the  case  really  are : 

"  There  can  be  no  rational  doubt,  I  think,  that 
the  English  language  has  gained,  and  is  gaining, 
enormously  by  its  expansion  over  the  American 
continent.  The  prime  function  of  a  language, 
after  all,  is  to  interpret  the  '  form  and  pressure ' 
of  life— the  experience,  knowledge,  thought, 
emotion,  and  aspiration  of  the  race  which  em- 
ploys it.  This  being  so,  the  more  tap-roots  a 
language  sends  down  into  the  soil  of  life,  and 
the  more  varied  the  strata  of  human  experience 
from  which  it  draws  its  nourishment,  whether  of 
vocabulary  or  idiom,  the  more  perfect  will  be  its 
potentialities  as  a  medium  of  expression.  We 
must  be  careful,  it  is  true,  to  keep  the  organism 
healthy,  to  guard  against  disintegration  of  tissue; 
but  to  that  duty  American  writers  are  quite  as 
keenly  alive  as  we.  It  is  not  a  source  of  weak- 
ness but  of  power  and  vitality  to  the  English  lan- 
guage that  it  should  embrace  a  greater  variety  of 

122 


AMERICANISMS   ONCE   MORE 

dialects  than  any  other  civilized  tongue.  A  new 
language,  says  the  proverb,  is  a  new  sense ;  but 
a  multiplicity  of  dialects  means,  for  the  posses- 
sors of  the  main  language,  an  enlargement  of  the 
pleasures  of  the  linguistic  sense  without  the  fa- 
tigue of  learning  a  totally  new  grammar  and 
vocabulary.  So  long  as  there  is  a  potent  literary 
tradition  keeping  the  core  of  the  language  one 
and  indivisible,  vernacular  variations  can  only 
tend,  in  virtue  of  the  survival  of  the  fittest,  to 
promote  the  abundance,  suppleness,  and  nicety 
of  adaptation  of  the  language  as  a  literary  instru- 
ment. The  English  language  is  no  mere  historic 
monument,  like  Westminster  Abbey,  to  be  reli- 
giously preserved  as  a  relic  of  the  past,  and  rever- 
enced as  the  burial-place  of  a  bygone  breed  of 
giants.  It  is  a  living  organism,  ceaselessly  busied, 
like  any  other  organism,  in  the  processes  of  assim- 
ilation and  excretion." 

('899) 


123 


VI 

NEW  WORDS  AND  OLD 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

NOT  long  before  the  opening  of  the  splendid 
exhibition  which,  for  the  short  space  of  six 
months,  made  Chicago  the  most  interesting  city 
in  the  world,  its  leading  literary  journal  editorially 
rejoiced  that  English  was  becoming  a  world-lan- 
guage, but  sorrowed  also  that  it  was  sadly  in 
danger  of  corruption,  especially  from  the  piebald 
jargon  of  our  so-called  dialect  stories.  Not  long 
before  the  celebration  of  the  Diamond  Jubilee  of 
Queen  Victoria  a  notorious  sensation-monger  of 
London,  having  founded  a  review  in  which  to 
exploit  himself,  proclaimed  that  English  was  in 
a  parlous  state,  and  that  something  ought  to  be 
done  at  once  or  the  language  would  surely  die. 
The  Chicago  editor  was  grieved  at  the  sorry  con- 
dition of  our  language  in  the  United  States,  while 
the  London  editor  wept  over  its  wretched  plight 
in  Great  Britain.  The  American  journalist  called 
upon  us  to  take,  pattern  by  the  British ;  and  the 
British  journalist  cried  out  for  an  Academy  like 
that  of  the  French  to  lay  down  laws  for  the 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

speaking  of  our  mother-tongue—intending  per- 
haps to  propose  later  the  revival  of  the  pillory  or 
of  the  ducking-stool  for  those  who  shall  infringe 
the  stringent  provisions  of  the  new  code. 

There  is  nothing  novel  in  these  shrill  outbreaks, 
which  serve  only  to  alarm  the  timid  and  to  reveal 
an  unhesitating  ignorance  of  the  history  of  our 
language.  The  same  kind  of  protest  has  been 
made  constantly  ever  since  English  has  been  re- 
cognized as  a  tongue  worthy  of  preservation  and 
protection ;  and  it  would  be  easy  to  supply  paral- 
lels without  number,  some  of  them  five  hundred 
years  old.  A  single  example  will  probably  suffice. 
In  Steele's  '  Tatler '  Swift  wrote  a  letter  denoun- 
cing "the  deplorable  ignorance  that  for  some 
years  hath  reigned  among  our  English  writers, 
the  great  depravity  of  our  taste,  and  the  continual 
corruption  of  our  style."  Here  we  find  the  '  Tat- 
ler '  (of  London)  in  the  first  decade  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century  saying  exactly  what  the  '  Dial '  (of 
Chicago)  echoed  in  the  last  decade  of  the  nine- 
teenth. But  the  earlier  writer  had  an  excuse  the 
later  writer  was  without ;  Swift  wrote  before  the 
history  of  our  language  was  understood. 

We  know  now  that  growth  is  a  condition  of 
life;  and  that  only  a  dead  language  is  rigid.  We 
know  now  that  it  is  dangerous  to  elevate  the 
literary  diction  too  far  above  the  speech  of  the 
plain  people.  We  have  found  out  that  nobody 
128 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

in  Rome  ever  spoke  Ciceronian  Latin;  Cicero  did 
not  speak  it  himself;  he  did  not  even  write  it 
naturally;  he  wrote  it  with  an  effort  and  not 
always  to  his  own  satisfaction  at  the  first  attempt. 
We  have  discovered  that  there  was  a  wide  gap 
between  the  elegance  of  the  orator's  polished 
periods  and  the  uncouth  bluntness  of  the  vulgar 
tongue  of  the  Roman  people ;  and  we  believe  that 
this  divergence  was  broader  than  that  between 
the  perfect  style  of  Hawthorne,  for  example, 
and  the  every-day  dialect  of  Salem  or  of  Con- 
cord. 

By  experts  like  Whitney  we  are  told  that  there 
has  been  less  structural  modification  of  our  lan- 
guage in  the  second  half  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury than  in  any  other  fifty-year  period  of  its 
existence.  Our  vocabulary  has  been  enormously 
enriched,  but  the  skeleton  of  our  speech  has  been 
only  a  little  developed.  With  the  decrease  in 
illiteracy  the  conserving  force  of  the  printing- 
press  must  always  hereafter  make  change  in- 
creasingly difficult— even  in  the  obvious  cases 
where  improvement  is  possible.  The  indirect 
influence  of  the  novelist  and  the  direct  influence 
of  the  schoolmaster— very  powerful  each  of  them 
and  almost  irresistible  when  united— will  always 
be  exerted  on  the  side  of  the  conservatives.  To 
seize  these  facts  firmly  and  to  understand  their 
applications  is  to  have  ready  always  an  ample 
129 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

answer  for  all  those  who  chatter  about  the  im- 
pending corruption  of  our  noble  tongue. 

But  we  may  go  further.  The  study  of  history 
shows  us  that  the  future  of  English  is  dependent 
not  on  the  watchfulness  of  its  guardians,  not 
upon  the  increasing  richness  and  flexibility  of  its 
vocabulary,  not  upon  the  modification  of  its  syn- 
tax, not  upon  the  needed  reform  of  its  orthog- 
raphy; it  is  not  dependent  upon  any  purity  or 
any  corruption  of  the  language  itself.  The  future 
of  the  English  language  is  dependent  upon  the 
future  of  the  two  great  peoples  that  speak  it;  it 
is  dependent  upon  the  strength,  the  energy,  the 
vigor,  and  the  virtue  of  the  British  and  the  Ameri- 
cans. A  language  is  but  the  instrument  of  those 
who  use  it;  and  English  has  flourished  and  spread 
not  because  of  its  own  merits,  many  as  they  are, 
but  because  of  the  forthputting  qualities  of  the 
masterful  English  stock.  It  must  rise  and  fall 
with  us  who  speak  it.  "  No  speech  can  do  more 
than  express  the  ideas  of  those  who  employ  it  at 
the  time,"  so  a  recent  historian  of  our  language 
has  reminded  us.  "  It  cannot  live  upon  its  past 
meanings,  or  upon  the  past  conceptions  of  great 
men  that  have  been  recorded  in  it,  any  more  than 
the  race  which  uses  it  can  live  upon  its  past  glory 
or  its  past  achievements." 

When  we  have  once  possessed  ourselves  of 
the  inexorable  fact  that  it  is  not  in  our  power 
130 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

to  warp  the  development  of  our  language  by  any 
conscious  effort,  we  can  listen  with  amused  tol- 
eration to  the  excited  outcries  of  those  who  are 
constantly  protesting  against  this  or  that  word  or 
phrase  or  usage  which  may  seem  to  them  new 
and  therefore  unjustifiable.  We  discover  also 
that  the  self-appointed  legislators  who  lay  down 
the  law  thus  peremptorily  are  often  emphatic  in 
exact  proportion  to  their  ignorance  of  the  history 
of  the  language. 

"Every  word  we  speak,"  so  Dr.  Holmes  told 
us,  "  is  the  medal  of  a  dead  thought  or  feeling, 
struck  in  the  die  of  some  human  experience, 
worn  smooth  by  innumerable  contacts,  and  al- 
ways transferred  warm  from  one  to  another." 
We  must  admit  that  these  chance  medalists  of 
language  have  not  always  been  gifted  artists  or 
skilled  craftsmen,  so  the  words  of  their  striking 
are  sometimes  misshapen;  nor  have  they  always 
respected  the  standard,  so  there  is  counterfeit 
coin  in  circulation  sometimes.  Even  when  the 
word  is  sterling  and  well  minted,  be  it  new  or 
old, 

Now  stamped  with  the  image  of  Good  Queen  Bess, 
And  now  of  a  Bloody  Mary, 

the  coin  itself  is  sometimes  locked  up  in  the 
reserve,  to  be  misrepresented  by  a  shabby  paper 
promise  to  pay.  So  fierce  is  the  popular  demand 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

for  an  increased  per  capita  that  the  verbal  cur- 
rency is  ever  in  danger  of  debasement.  This  is 
the  apparent  justification  of  the  self-appointed 
tellers  who  busy  themselves  with  touchstones  of 
their  own  and  who  venture  to  throw  out  much 
false  coin.  Their  tests  are  trustworthy  now  and 
again;  but  more  often  than  not  the  pieces  they 
have  nailed  to  the  counter  are  of  full  weight  and 
ought  to  pass  current. 

"There  is  a  purism,"  Whitney  said,  "which, 
while  it  seeks  to  maintain  the  integrity  of  the 
language,  in  effect  stifles  its  growth;  to  be  too 
fearful  of  new  words  and  phrases,  new  meanings, 
familiar  and  colloquial  expressions,  is  little  less 
fatal  to  the  well-being  of  a  spoken  tongue  than 
to  rush  into  the  opposite  extreme."  And  Pro- 
fessor Lounsbury  goes  further  and  asserts  that 
our  language  is  not  to-day  in  danger  from  the 
agencies  commonly  supposed  to  be  corrupting  it, 
but  rather  "  from  ignorant  efforts  made  to  pre- 
serve what  is  called  its  purity."  And  elsewhere 
the  same  inexpugnable  authority  reminds  us  that 
"the  history  of  language  is  the  history  of  cor- 
ruptions," and  that  "the  purest  of  speakers  uses 
every  day,  with  perfect  propriety,  words  and 
forms  which,  looked  at  from  the  point  of  view 
of  the  past,  are  improper,  if  not  scandalous." 

There  would  be  both  interest  and  instruction  in 
a  list  of  the  many  words  securely  intrenched  in 
132 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

our  own  vocabulary  to-day  Which  were  bitterly 
assaulted  on  their  first  appearance.  Swift  praises 
himself  for  his  valiant  effort  against  certain  of 
these  intruders:  "I  have  done  my  utmost  for 
some  years  past  to  stop  the  progress  of  mob  and 
banter,  but  have  been  plainly  borne  down  by 
numbers  and  betrayed  by  those  who  promised  to 
assist  me."  Puttenham  (or  whoever  it  was  that 
wrote  the  anonymous  'Arte  of  English  Poesie/ 
published  in  1589)  admitted  the  need  of  certain 
words  to  which  the  purists  might  justly  object, 
and  then  adds  that  "  many  other  like  words  bor- 
rowed out  of  the  Latin  and  French  were  not  so 
well  to  be  allowed  by  us,"  citing  then,  among 
those  of  which  he  disapproved,  audacious, 
egregious,  and  compatible.  In  the  'Poetaster,' 
acted  in  1601,  Ben  Jonson  satirized  Marston's 
verbal  innovations,  and  among  the  words  he 
reviled  are  clumsy,  inflate,  spurious,  conscious, 
strenuous,  defunct,  retrograde,  and  reciprocal; 
and  in  his  '  Discoveries '  Jonson  shrewdly  re- 
marked that  "  a  man  coins  not  a  new  word  with- 
out some  peril  and  less  fruit;  for  if  it  happen  to 
be  received,  the  praise  is  but  moderate;  if  re- 
fused, the  scorn  is  assured." 

Puttenham  wrote  at  the  end  of  the  sixteenth 
century,  Jonson  at  the  beginning  of  the  seven- 
teenth, Swift  at  the  beginning  of  the  eighteenth; 
and  at  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  we  find 
•33 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

Lady  Holland  declaring  influential  to  be  a  detest- 
able word  and  asserting  that  she  had  tried  in  vain 
to  get  Sheridan  to  forego  it. 

At  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century  the  battle 
was  still  raging  over  standpoint,  for  example,  and 
over  reliable  and  over  lengthy,  and  over  a  score 
of  others,  all  of  which  bid  fair  to  establish  them- 
selves ultimately  because  they  supply  a  demand 
more  or  less  insistent.  The  fate  is  more  doubt- 
ful of  photo  for  photograph  and  of  phone  for  tele- 
phone ;  they  both  strike  us  now  as  vulgarisms, 
just  as  mob  (and  for  the  same  reason)  struck 
Swift  as  vulgar;  and  it  may  be  that  in  time  they 
will  live  down  this  stigma  of  illegitimacy  just  as 
mob  has  survived  it.  Then  there  is  the  misbe- 
gotten verb,  to  enthuse,  in  my  sight  the  most 
hideous  of  vocables.  What  is  to  be  its  fate  ? 
Altho  I  have  detected  it  in  the  careful  col- 
umns of  the  'Nation,'  it  has  not  as  yet  been 
adopted  by  any  acknowledged  master  of  Eng- 
lish; none  the  less,  I  fear  me  greatly,  it  has  all 
the  vitality  of  other  ill  weeds.  And  is  bike  going 
to  get  itself  recognized  as  a  substitute  for  bicycle, 
both  as  verb  and  as  noun  ?  It  seems  to  be  pos- 
sible, since  a  monosyllable  has  always  an  advan- 
tage over  a  trisyllable  in  our  impatient  mouths. 

Swift  objected  sharply  to  the  curtailing  of 
words  "  when  we  are  already  overloaded  with 
monosyllables,  which  are  the  disgrace  of  our  lan- 
'34 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

guage."  Then  he  wittily  characterizes  the  pro- 
cess by  which  mob  had  been  made,  cab  was  to 
be  made,  and  photo  is  now  in  the  making :  "  Thus 
we  cram  one  syllable  and  cut  off  the  rest,  as  the 
owl  fattened  her  mice  after  she  had  bit  off  their 
legs  to  prevent  them  from  running  away;  and  if 
ours  be  the  same  reason  for  maiming  our  words, 
it  will  certainly  answer  the  end:  for  I  am  sure 
no  other  nation  will  desire  to  borrow  them." 
Swift  was  rash  enough  to  assert  that  speculation, 
operation,  preliminaries,  ambassador,  communica- 
tion, and  battalion  were  words  newly  introduced, 
and  also  to  prophesy  that  they  were  too  poly- 
syllabic to  be  able  to  endure  many  more  cam- 
paigns. As  it  happens  no  attempt  has  been  made 
to  shorten  any  one  of  them  except  speculation, 
and  it  can  hardly  be  maintained  that  spec  has 
established  itself.  Certainly  it  has  not  disestab- 
lished speculation,  as  mob  has  driven  out  mobile 
•vulgus. 

Dryden  declared  that  he  traded  "  both  with  the 
living  and  the  dead  for  the  enrichment  of  our 
native  language";  but  he  denied  that  he  Latin- 
ized too  much;  and  most  of  the  Gallicisms  he 
attempted  have  not  won  acceptance.  Lowell 
thought  that  Dryden  did  not  add  a  single  word 
to  the  language,  unless  "  he  first  used  magnetism 
in  its  present  sense  of  moral  attraction."  Dr. 
Holmes  also  discovered  that  it  is  not  enough  to 
'35 


NEW   WORDS   AND  OLD 

make  a  new  word  when  it  is  needed  and  to  fash- 
ion it  fitly;  its  fortune  still  depends  on  public 
caprice  or  popular  instinct.  "  I  've  sometimes 
made  new  words,"  he  told  a  friend;  "  I  made 
chrysocracy,  thinking  it  would  take  its  place,  but 
it  did  n't;  plutocracy,  meaning  the  same  thing, 
was  adopted  instead. "  But  anesthesia  is  a  word 
of  Dr.  Holmes's  making  which  has  won  its  way 
not  only  in  English  but  in  most  of  the  other 
modern  languages.  It  may  be  doubted  whether 
a  like  fortune  will  follow  another  word  to  be 
found  quoted  in  one  of  his  letters,  aproposity,  a 
bilingual  hybrid  not  without  analogues  in  our 
language. 

It  is  with  surprise  that  in  Stevenson's  very 
Scotch  romance  '  David  Balfour '  we  happen  upon 
another  malformation— come-at-able,  hitherto  sup- 
posed to  be  Yankee  in  its  origin  and  in  its  aroma. 
Elsewhere  in  the  same  story  we  read  "  you  claim 
to  be  innocent,"  a  form  which  the  cockney  critics 
are  wont  to  call  American.  Stevenson  in  this 
novel  uses  both  the  modern  jeopardise  and  the 
ancient  enjeopardy.  Just  why  to  jeopardise 
should  have  driven  to  jeopard  out  of  use,  it  is  not 
easy  to  declare,  nor  why  leniency  is  supplanting 
lenity.  As  drunk  seems  to  suggest  total  intoxi- 
cation, it  is  possible  to  discover  the  cause  of  the 
increasing  tendency  to  say  "  I  have  drank."  No 
defense  is  easy  of  in  our  midst  for  in  the  midst 
136 


NEW   WORDS   AND  OLD 

of  us,  and  yet  it  will  prevail  inevitably,  for  it  is 
a  convenient  short-cut.  Dr.  Holmes  confessed 
to  Richard  Grant  White  that  he  had  used  it  once, 
and  that  Edward  Everett  (who  had  also  once 
fallen  from  grace)  made  him  see  the  error  of  his 
ways.  It  is  to  be  found  twice  in  Stevenson's 
'Amateur  Emigrant,'  and  again  in  the  '  Res  Judi- 
catae '  of  Mr.  Augustine  Birrell,  a  brisk  essayist, 
altho  not  an  impeccable  stylist. 

It  is  nothing  against  a  noun  that  it  is  new.  To 
call  it  a  neologism  is  but  begging  the  question. 
Of  necessity  every  word  was  new  once.  It  was 
"  struck  in  the  die  of  human  experience,"  to  come 
back  to  Dr.  Holmes's  figure;  and  it  is  at  its  best 
before  it  is  "  worn  smooth  by  innumerable  con- 
tacts." Lowell  thought  it  was  a  chief  element 
of  Shakspere's  greatness  that  "  he  found  words 
ready  to  his  use,  original  and  untarnished— types 
of  thought  whose  sharp  edges  were  unworn  by 
repeated  impressions."  He  "  found  a  language 
already  established  but  not  yet  fetlocked  by  dic- 
tionary and  grammar  mongers."  For  the  same 
reason  Merimee  delighted  in  Russian,  because  it 
was  "young,  the  pedants  not  having  had  time 
to  spoil  it;  it  is  admirably  fit  for  poetry." 

This  native  relish  for  the  uncontaminated  word 

it  was  that  led  Hugo  and  Gautier  to  ransack  all 

sorts  of  special  vocabularies.     This  thirst  for  the 

unhackneyed  epithet  it  is  that  urges  Mr.  Rud- 

>37 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

yard  Kipling  to  avail  himself  of  the  technical 
terms  of  trade,  which  serve  his  purpose,  not 
merely  because  they  are  exact,  but  also  because 
they  are  unexpected.  The  device  is  dangerous, 
no  doubt,  but  a  writer  of  delicate  perceptions  can 
find  his  advantage  in  it.  Perhaps  George  Eliot 
was  a  little  too  fond  of  injecting  into  fiction  the 
terminology  of  science,  but  there  was  nothing 
blameworthy  in  the  desire  to  enlarge  the  vocabu- 
lary which  should  be  at  the  command  of  the 
novelist.  Professor  Dowden  records  that  when 
she  used  in  a  story  words  and  phrases  like  dy- 
namic and  natural  selection,  the  reviewer  pricked 
up  his  delicate  ears  and  shied ;  and  he  makes  bold 
to  suggest  that  "  if  the  thoroughbred  critic  could 
only  be  led  close  up  to  dynamic,  he  would  find 
that  dynamic  would  not  bite."  Every  lover  of 
our  language  will  sympathize  with  Professor 
Dowden's  assertion  that  "  a  protest  of  common 
sense  is  really  called  for  against  the  affectation 
which  professes  to  find  obscurity  in  words  be- 
cause they  are  trisyllabic  or  because  they  carry 
with  them  scientific  associations.  Language,  the 
instrument  of  literary  art,  is  an  instrument  of 
ever-extending  range,  and  the  truest  pedantry,  in 
an  age  when  the  air  is  saturated  with  scientific 
thought,  would  be  to  reject  those  accessions  to 
the  language  which  are  the  special  gain  of  the 
time." 

138 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

Where  George  Eliot  erred— if  err  she  did  at  all 
in  this  matter— was  in  the  use  of  scientific  terms 
inappropriately,  or,  so  to  say,  boastfully,  whereby 
she  aroused  an  association  of  ideas  foreign  to  the 
purpose  in  hand.  Every  writer  needs  to  consider 
most  carefully  both  the  obvious  and  the  remote 
associations  of  the  phrases  he  employs,  that  these 
may  intensify  the  thought  he  wishes  to  convey. 
A  word  is  known  by  the  company  it  has  kept. 
Especially  must  a  poet  have  a  keen  nose  for  the 
fragrant  word,  or  else  his  stanzas  will  lack  savor. 
The  magic  of  his  art  lies  largely  in  the  syllables 
he  selects,  in  their  sound  and  in  their  color.  Not 
their  meanings  merely  are  important  to  him,  but 
their  suggestions  also— not  what  they  denote 
more  than  what  they  connote.  An  American 
psychologist  has  recently  told  us  that  every  word 
has  not  only  its  own  note  but  also  its  overtones. 
With  unconscious  foresight,  the  great  poets  have 
always  acted  on  this  theory. 

Perhaps  this  is  a  reason  why  the  poets  have 
ever  been  ready  to  rescue  a  cast-off  word  from 
the  rubbish-heap  of  the  past.  Professor  Earle 
(of  Oxford)  declares  that  "  it  has  been  one  of  the 
most  interesting  features  of  the  new  vigor  and 
independence  of  American  literature,  that  it  has 
often  displayed  in  a  surprising  manner  what 
springs  of  novelty  there  are  in  reserve  and  to  be 
elicited  by  novel  combinations"— a  statement 
'39 


NEW   WORDS   AND  OLD 

more  complimentary  in  its  intent  than  felicitous 
in  its  phrasing.  And  Professor  Earle  praises 
Emerson  and  Lowell  and  Holmes  for  their  skill 
in  enriching  our  modern  English  with  the  old 
words  locked  up  out  of  sight  in  the  treasuries  of 
the  past.  Lowell  said  of  Emerson  that  "  his  eye 
for  a  fine,  telling  phrase  that  will  carry  true  is 
like  that  of  a  backwoodsman  for  a  rifle;  and  he 
will  dredge  you  up  a  choice  word  from  the  mud 
of  Cotton  Mather  himself." 

Of  course  this  effort  to  recover  the  scattered 
pearls  of  speech,  dropped  by  the  wayside  in  the 
course  of  the  centuries,  is  peculiar  neither  to  the 
United  States  nor  to  the  nineteenth  century — 
altho  perhaps  it  has  been  carried  further  in  our 
country  and  in  our  time  than  anywhere  else. 
Modern  Greek  has  recalled  to  its  aid  as  much  old 
Greek  as  it  can  assimilate.  Sallust  was  accused 
by  an  acrid  critic  of  having  made  a  list  of  obsolete 
words,  which  he  strove  deliberately  to  reintroduce 
into  Latin.  This  is,  in  effect,  what  Spenser  sought 
to  do  with  Chaucer's  vocabulary;  and  it  is  curious 
to  reflect  that,  owing,  it  may  be,  in  part,  to  the 
example  set  by  the  author  of  the  'Faerie  Queene,' 
the  language  of  the  '  Canterbury  Tales '  is  far 
less  strange,  less  remote,  less  archaic  to  us  to-day 
than  it  was  to  the  Elizabethans. 

A  rapid  consumption  of  the  vocabulary  is  going 
on  constantly.  Words  are  swiftly  worn  out  and 
140 


NEW   WORDS   AND  OLD 

used  up  and  thrown  aside.  New  words  are 
made  or  borrowed  to  fill  the  vacancies;  and  old 
words  are  impressed  into  service  and  forced  to 
do  double  duty.  No  sooner  is  a  new  dictionary 
completed  than  the  editor  sets  about  his  inevi- 
table supplement.  And  the  dictionary  is  not  only 
of  necessity  incomplete:  it  is  also  inadequate  in 
its  definitions,  for  it  may  happen  that  a  word  will 
take  on  an  added  meaning  while  the  big  book 
is  at  the  bindery.  Our  language  is  fluctuating 
always ;  and  now  one  word  and  now  another  has 
expanded  its  content  or  has  shrunk  away  into 
insignificance.  No  definition  is  surely  stable  for 
long.  When  Cotton  Mather  wrote  in  defense  of 
his  own  style  disgust  was  fairly  equivalent  to 
dislike  ;  "  and  if  a  more  massy  way  of  writing  be 
never  so  much  disgusted  at  this  day,  a  better 
gust  will  come  on." 

Once  upon  a  time  to  aggravate  meant  to  in- 
crease an  offense;  now  it  is  often  used  as  tho 
it  meant  to  irritate.  Formerly  calculated— as  in 
the  sentence  "  it  was  calculated  to  do  harm  "— 
implied  a  deliberate  intention  to  injure;  now  the 
idea  of  intention  has  been  eliminated  and  the 
sentence  is  held  to  be  roughly  equivalent  to  "  it 
was  likely  to  do  harm."  Verbal  is  slowly  get- 
ting itself  accepted  as  synonymous  with  oral,  in 
antithesis  to  written.  Lurid  was  really  pale,  wan, 
ghastly ;  but  how  often  of  late  has  it  been  em- 
141 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

ployed  as  tho  it  signified  red  or  ruddy  or 
bloody  ? 

At  first  these  new  uses  of  these  old  words 
were  slovenly  and  inadmissible  inaccuracies,  but 
by  sheer  insistence  they  are  winning  their  par- 
don, until  at  last  they  will  gain  authority  as  they 
broaden  down  from  precedent  to  precedent.  It 
is  well  to  be  off  with  the  old  word  before  you 
are  on  with  the  new;  and  no  writer  who  re- 
spects his  mother-tongue  is  ever  in  haste  to  take 
up  with  words  thus  wrested  from  the  primitive 
propriety. 

But,  as  Dryden  declared  when  justifying  his 
modernizing  of  Chaucer's  vocabulary,  "  Words 
are  not  like  landmarks,  so  sacred  as  never  to  be 
removed;  customs  are  changed,  and  even  statutes 
are  silently  repealed  when  the  reason  ceases  for 
which  they  were  enacted."  It  was  Dryden's 
"  Cousin  Swift "  who  once  declared  that  "  a  nice 
man  is  a  man  of  nasty  ideas  "—an  assertion 
which  I  venture  to  believe  to  be  wholly  incom- 
prehensible to-day  to  the  young  ladies  of  Eng- 
land in  whose  mouths  nice  means  agreeable  and 
nasty  means  disagreeable.  Nice  has  suffered  this 
inexplicable  metamorphosis  in  the  United  States 
as  well  as  in  Great  Britain,  but  nasty  has  not  yet 
been  emptied  of  its  original  offensiveness  here  as 
it  has  over  there.  And  even  in  British  speech  the 
transformation  is  relatively  recent ;  I  think  Steven- 
142 


NEW    WORDS   AND   OLD 

son  was  guilty  of  an  anachronism  in  'Weir  of 
Hermiston '  when  he  put  it  in  the  mouth  of  a 
young  Scot. 

If  the  Scotch  have  followed  the  evil  example 
of  the  English  in  misusing  nasty,  the  English  in 
turn  have  twisted  the  ilk  of  North  Britain  to 
serve  their  own  ends.  Of  that  ilk  is  a  phrase 
added  to  a  man's  surname  to  show  that  this 
name  and  the  name  of  his  estate  are  the  same; 
thus  Bradwardine  of  Bradwardine  would  be 
called  "  Bradwardine  of  that  ilk."  But  it  is  not 
uncommon  now  to  see  a  phrase  like  "  people  of 
that  ilk,"  meaning  obviously  "people  of  that 
sort." 

In  like  manner  awful  and  terrible  and  elegant 
have  been  so  misused  as  mere  intensives  that  a 
careful  writer  now  strikes  them  out  when  they 
come  off  the  end  of  his  pen  in  their  original 
meaning.  So  quite  no  longer  implies  completely 
but  is  almost  synonymous  with  somewhat— 
quite  poor  meaning  somewhat  poor  and  quite 
good  meaning  pretty  good.  Unique  is  getting  to 
imply  merely  excellent  or  perhaps  only  unusual; 
its  exact  etymological  value  is  departing  forever. 
Creole,  which  should  be  applied  only  to  Cauca- 
sian natives  of  tropical  countries  born  of  Latin 
parents,  is  beginning  to  carry  with  it  in  the  vul- 
gar tongue  of  to-day  a  vague  suspicion  of  negro 
blood. 

«43 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

While  the  perversion  of  nice  and  nasty  \s  British, 
there  is  an  American  perversion  of  dirt  not  unlike 
it.  To  most  Americans,  I  think,  dirt  suggests 
earth  or  soil  or  clay  or  dust;  to  most  Americans, 
I  think,  dirt  no  longer  carries  with  it  any  sug- 
gestion of  dirtiness.  I  have  heard  a  mother 
send  her  little  boy  off  to  make  mud-pies  on  con- 
dition that  he  used  only  "clean  dirt" \  and  I 
know  that  a  lawn-tennis  ground  of  compacted 
earth  is  called  a  dirt  court.  Yet,  tho  the  noun 
has  thus  been  defecated,  the  adjective  keeps 
its  earlier  force;  and  there  even  lingers  some- 
thing of  the  pristine  value  in  the  noun  itself 
when  it  is  employed  in  the  picturesque  idiom 
of  the  Rocky  Mountains,  where  to  be  guilty  of 
an  underhand  injury  against  any  one  is  to  do 
him  dirt.  Lovers  of  Western  verse  will  recall 
how  the  frequenters  of  Casey's  table  d'hote 
went  to  see  "  Modjesky  as  Cameel,"  and  how 
they  sat  in  silence  until  the  break  occurs  between 
the  lover  and  his  mistress : 

At  that  Three-fingered  Hoover  says:  "I  '11  chip  into  this  game, 
And  see  if  Red  Hoss  Mountain  cannot  reconstruct  the  same. 
I  won't  set  by  and  see  the  feelin's  of  a  lady  hurt— 
Gol  durn  a  critter,  anyhow,  that  does  a  woman  dirt !  " 

Here  no  doubt,  we  have  crossed  the  confines 
of  slang;  but  having  done  so,  I  venture  upon  an 
anecdote  which  will  serve  to  show  how  com- 
•44 


NEW    WORDS   AND   OLD 

pletely  sometimes  the  newer  meaning  of  a  word 
substitutes  itself  for  the  older.  Two  friends  of 
mine  were  in  a  train  of  the  elevated  railroad, 
passing  through  that  formerly  craggy  part  of 
upper  New  York  which  was  once  called  Shanty- 
town  and  which  now  prefers  to  be  known  as 
Harlem.  One  of  them  drew  the  attention  of  the 
other  to  the  capering  young  capricorns  that 
sported  over  the  blasted  rocks  by  the  side  of  the 
lofty  track.  "Just  look  at  those  kids,"  were  the 
words  he  used.  He  was  overheard  by  a  boy  of 
the  streets  sitting  in  the  next  seat,  who  glanced 
out  of  the  window  at  once,  but  failed  to  discover 
the  children  he  expected  to  behold.  Whereupon 
he  promptly  looked  up  and  corrected  my  friend. 
"Them  's  not  kids,"  declared  the  urchin  of  Man- 
hattan; "them  's  little  goats!  "  In  the  mind  of 
this  native  youngster  there  was  no  doubt  at  all 
as  to  the  meaning  of  the  word  kid ;  to  him  it 
meant  child ;  and  he  would  have  scorned  any 
explanation  that  it  ever  had  meant  young  goat. 

In  ignorance  is  certainty,  and  with  increase  of 
wisdom  comes  hesitancy.  For  example,  what 
does  the  word  romantic  really  mean  ?  Few  ad- 
jectives are  harder  worked  in  the  history  of 
modern  literature;  and  no  two  of  those  who  use 
it  would  agree  upon  its  exact  context.  It  sug- 
gests one  set  of  circumstances  to  the  student  of 
English  literature,  a  second  set  to  a  student  of 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

German  literature,  and  a  third  to  a  student  of 
French  literature;  while  every  student  of  com- 
parative literature  must  echo  Professor  Kuno 
Francke's  longing  for  "the  formation  of  an  in- 
ternational league  for  the  suppression  of  the 
terms  both  romanticism  and  classicism." 

Other  words  there  are  almost  as  ambiguous— 
philology,  for  example,  and  college  and  chapel. 
By  classical  philology  we  understand  the  study 
of  all  that  survives  of  the  civilizations  of  Greece 
and  Rome,  their  languages,  their  literature,  their 
laws,  their  arts.  But  has  Romance  philology  or 
Germanic  philology  so  broad  a  basis  ?  Has  Eng- 
lish philology  ?  To  nine  out  of  ten  of  us,  this  use 
of  the  word  now  seems  to  put  stress  on  the 
study  of  linguistics  as  against  the  study  of  liter- 
ature; to  ninety-nine  out  of  a  hundred,  I  think, 
philologist  suggests  the  narrow  student  of  lin- 
guistics; and  therefore  the  wider  meaning  seems 
likely  soon  to  fall  into  innocuous  desuetude. 

The  change  in  the  application  of  college  is  still 
in  process  of  accomplishment.  In  England  a 
college  was  a  place  of  instruction,  sometimes 
independent  (as  Eton  College,  in  which  case  it  is 
really  a  high  school)  and  sometimes  a  compo- 
nent part  of  a  university  (in  which  case  the  rest 
of  the  organization  is  not  infrequently  non-exis- 
tent). An  English  university  is  not  unlike  a 
federation  of  colleges ;  and  the  relation  of  Merton 
146 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

and  Magdalen  to  Oxford  is  not  unlike  that  of 
Massachusetts  and  Virginia  to  the  United  States. 
In  America  college  and  university  were  long 
carelessly  confused,  as  tho  they  were  intercon- 
vertible terms;  but  of  late  a  sharp  distinction  is 
being  set  up— a  distinction  quite  different  from 
that  obtaining  in  England.  In  this  new  Ameri- 
can usage,  a  college  is  a  place  where  undergradu- 
ates are  trained,  and  a  university  is  a  place  where 
graduate-students  are  guided  in  research.  Thus 
the  college  gives  breadth,  and  the  university  adds 
depth.  Thus  the  college  provides  general  culture 
and  the  university  provides  the  opportunity  of 
specialization.  If  we  accept  this  distinction, — 
and  it  has  been  accepted  by  all  those  who  discuss 
the  higher  education  in  America, —  we  are  forced 
to  admit  that  the  most  of  the  self-styled  univer- 
sities of  this  country  should  be  called  colleges; 
and  we  are  allowed  to  observe  that  the  college 
and  the  university  can  exist  side  by  side  in  the 
same  institution,  as  at  Harvard  and  at  Columbia. 
We  are  forced  also  to  admit  that  what  is  known 
in  Great  Britain  as  "  University  Extension  "  can- 
not fairly  retain  that  title  here  in  the  United 
States,  since  its  object  is  not  the  extension  of 
university  work,  as  we  now  understand  the 
word  university  here;  it  is  at  most  the  extension 
of  college  work. 

While  this  modification  of  the  meaning  of  col- 
M7 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

lege  is  being  made  in  America,  a  modification  of 
chapel  has  been  made  in  England.  At  first 
chapel  described  a  subordinate  part  of  a  church, 
devoted  to  special  services.  By  natural  extension 
it  came  to  denote  a  smaller  edifice  subsidiary  to 
a  large  church,  as  Grace  Church,  in  New  York, 
was  once  a  chapel  of  Trinity  Church.  But  in  the 
nineteenth  century  chapel  came  to  be  applied  in 
England  especially  to  the  humbler  meeting-houses 
of  the  various  sects  of  dissenters,  while  church  is 
reserved  for  the  places  of  worship  of  the  estab- 
lished religion.  Thus  Sir  Walter  Besant  classifies 
the  population  of  a  riverside  parish  in  London 
into  those  who  go  to  church  and  those  who  go 
to  chapel,  having  no  doubt  that  all  his  British 
readers  will  understand  the  former  to  be  Episco- 
palians and  the  latter  Methodists  or  the  like. 

This  is  a  Briticism  not  likely  ever  to  be  adopted 
in  America.  But  another  Briticism  bids  fair  to 
have  a  better  fortune.  Living  as  they  do  on  a 
little  group  of  islands,  the  British  naturally  are  in 
the  habit  of  referring  to  the  rest  of  Europe  as  the 
Continent.  They  run  across  the  Channel  to  take 
a  little  tour  "on  the  Continent."  They  speak  of 
the  pronunciation  of  Latin  that  obtains  every- 
where but  in  Great  Britain  and  Ireland  as  the 
continental  pronunciation.  When  they  wish  to 
differentiate  their  authors,  for  instance,  from  the 
French  and  the  German  and  the  Italians,  they 
148 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

lump  these  last  together  as  the  continental  authors. 
The  division  of  Europe  into  continental  and 
British  is  so  convenient  that  it  is  certain  to  be 
adopted  on  this  side  of  the  Atlantic.  Already  has 
a  New  York  literary  review,  after  having  had  a 
series  of  papers  on  "  Living  Critics  "  (in  which 
were  included  both  British  writers  and  American), 
followed  it  with  a  series  of  "  Living  Continental 
Critics "  (in  which  the  chief  critics  of  France, 
Germany,  Spain,  and  Scandinavia  were  consid- 
ered). Yet  there  is  no  logic  in  this  use  of  the 
word  over  here,  since  we  Americans  are  not  in- 
sular; and  since  North  America  is  a  continent  just 
as  Europe  is.  As  it  happens,  the  word  continen- 
tal in  a  wholly  contradictory  meaning  is  glorious 
in  the  history  of  the  United  States.  Who  does 
not  know  how, 

In  their  ragged  regimentals, 
Stood  the  old  Continentals, 
Yielding  not  ? 

None  the  less  will  the  convenience  of  this 
British  use  of  the  word  outweigh  its  lack  of  logic 
in  America— as  convenience  has  so  often  over- 
ridden far  more  serious  considerations.  Lan- 
guage is  only  a  tool,  after  all;  and  it  must  ever 
be  shaped  to  fit  the  hand  that  uses  it.  This  is 
why  another  illogical  misuse  of  a  word  will  get 
itself  recognized  as  legitimate  sooner  or  later— 
149 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

the  limitations  of  American  to  mean  only  that 
which  belongs  to  the  United  States.  When  we 
speak  of  American  ideas  we  intend  to  exclude 
not  only  the  ideas  of  South  America  but  also 
those  of  Mexico  and  of  Canada;  we  are  really 
arrogating  to  ourselves  a  supremacy  so  over- 
whelming as  to  warrant  our  ignoring  altogether 
all  the  other  peoples  having  a  right  to  share  in 
the  adjective.  Our  reason  for  this  is  that  there 
is  no  national  adjective  available  for  us.  We  can 
speak  of  Mexican  ideas  and  of  Canadian  ideas ; 
but  we  cannot— or  at  least  we  do  not  and  we 
will  not— speak  of  United  Statesian  ideas.  And 
this  appropriation  to  ourselves  of  an  adjective 
really  the  property  of  all  the  inhabitants  of  the 
continent  seems  to  be  perfectly  acceptable  to  the 
only  other  group  of  those  inhabitants  speaking 
our  language,— the  English  colonists  to  the  north 
of  us.  On  both  sides  of  the  Niagara  River  the 
smaller  brother  of  the  gigantic  Horseshoe  cataract 
is  known  as  the  "American  fall."  Even  in  the 
last  century  the  British  employed  American  to 
indicate  the  inhabitants  of  the  thirteen  colonies ; 
and  Dr.  Johnson  wrote  in  1 775 :  "  That  the  Ameri- 
cans are  able  to  bear  taxation  is  indubitable." 
But  our  ownership  of  American  as  a  national 
adjective,  if  tolerated  by  the  Canadians  and  the 
British,  is  not  admitted  by  those  who  do  not 
speak  our  language.  Probably  to  both  the  Ital- 
150 


NEW   WORDS    AND   OLD 

ians  and  the  Spaniards  South  America  rather  than 
North  is  the  part  of  the  world  that  rises  in  the 
mental  vision  when  the  word  American  is  sud- 
denly pronounced. 

Another  distinction  not  unlike  this,  but  logical 
as  well  as  convenient,  is  getting  itself  recognized. 
This  distinction  results  from  accepting  the 
obvious  fact  that  the  literature  of  the  English 
language  has  nowadays  two  independent  divi- 
sions—that produced  in  the  British  Isles  and  that 
produced  in  the  United  States.  The  writers  of 
both  nations  speak  the  English  language,  and 
therefore  their  works— whensoever  these  rise  to 
the  level  of  literature— belong  to  English  litera- 
ture. We  are  wont  to  call  one  division  Ameri- 
can literature,  and  we  are  beginning  to  see  that 
logic  will  soon  force  us  to  call  the  other  division 
British  literature.  Mr.  Stedman  has  dealt  with 
the  poetry  of  the  English  language  of  the  past 
sixty  years  in  two  volumes,  one  on  the  '  Vic- 
torian Poets,'  and  the  other  on  the  'Poets  of 
America,'  and  this  serves  to  show  how  sharp  is 
the  line  of  separation.  With  his  customary  care- 
fulness of  epithet,  Mr.  Stedman  in  the  preface  to 
the  earlier  volume  always  uses  British  as  the 
antithesis  of  American,  reserving  English  as  the 
broader  adjective  to  cover  both  branches  of  our 
literature.  Probably  the  many  collections  of  the 
'  British  Poets,'  the '  British  Novelists,'  the '  British 


NEW  WORDS   AND   OLD 

Theater,'  were  so  called  to  allow  the  inclusion  of 
works  produced  in  the  sister  kingdoms ;  it  is  well 
to  remember  that  Scott  and  Moore  were  neither 
of  them  Englishmen.  There  is  a  certain  piquancy 
in  the  fact  that  the  adjective  British,  available  in 
the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century  because 
it  included  the  Scotch  and  the  Irish,  is  even  more 
useful  at  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century  be- 
cause it  differentiates  the  English,  Scotch,  and 
Irish,  taken  all  together,  from  the  Americans. 

Telegram  was  denounced  as  a  mismade  word, 
and  cablegram  was  rejected  with  abhorrence  by 
all  defenders  of  purity.  Yet  the  firm  establish- 
ment of  telegraph  and  telephone  made  certain  the 
ultimate  acceptance  of  telegram.  But  cablegram 
is  still  on  probation,  and  may  fail  of  admission  in 
the  end,  perhaps,  because  a  part  of  the  word 
seems  to  be  better  fitted  for  its  purpose  than  the 
whole.  A  message  received  by  the  telegraph 
under  the  ocean  is  often  curtly  called  a  cable,  as 
when  a  man  says,  "  I  've  just  had  a  cable  from 
my  wife  in  Paris."  This,  I  think,  is  rather 
American  than  British;  but  it  is  akin  to  the 
British  use  of  wire  as  synonymous  with  both 
telegram  and  to  telegraph.  An  Englishman  invites 
you  to  a  house-party,  and  writes  that  he  will  meet 
you  at  the  station  "  on  a  wire,"  intending  to  con- 
vey to  you  his  desire  that  you  should  telegraph 
him  the  hour  of  your  arrival.  In  a  short  story  by 
152 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

Mr.  Henry  James,  that  most  conscientious  of 
recorders  of  British  speech,  he  tells  us  that  after 
wires  and  counterwires  one  of  the  characters  of 
his  tale  was  at  last  able  to  arrive  at  the  house 
where  the  action  takes  place.  The  locution  is 
hot  from  the  verbal  foundry;  and  it  seems  to 
imply  what  an  American  writer  would  have  ex- 
pressed by  saying  that  there  had  been  "tele- 
graphing to  and  fro." 

American,  probably,  is  the  verb  to  process,  and 
also  its  past  participle  processed.  When  new 
methods  of  photo-engraving  were  introduced 
here  in  the  United  States,  a  black-and-white 
artist  would  express  a  preference  either  to  have 
his  drawing  engraved  on  wood  or  have  it  repro- 
duced mechanically  by  a  photo-engraving  pro- 
cess; and  as  he  needed  a  brief  word  to  describe 
this  latter  act,  one  was  promptly  forthcoming, 
and  he  asked,  "  Is  this  thing  of  mine  to  be 
engraved  or  processed?"  The  word  half-tone 
seems  also  to  be  of  American  manufacture;  and 
it  describes  one  of  these  methods  of  photo-en- 
graving. It  is  not  only  a  noun,  but  also,  on  occa- 
sions, a  verb;  and  the  artist  will  ask  if  his  wash- 
drawing  is  to  be  half-toned.  Of  necessity  the 
several  improvements  in  the  art  of  photo-engrav- 
ing brought  with  them  a  variety  of  new  terms 
absolutely  essential  in  the  terminology  of  the 
craft,  most  of  them  remaining  hidden  in  the 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

technical  vocabulary,  altho  now  and  again  one 
or  another  has  thrust  itself  up  into  the  general 
language. 

Any  attempt  to  declare  the  British  or  the 
American  origin  of  an  idiom  is  most  precarious; 
and  he  who  ventures  upon  it  has  need  of  double 
caution.  When  a  friend  of  mine  asked  the  boy 
at  the  door  of  the  club  if  it  was  still  raining,  and 
was  answered,  "No,  sir;  it  's  fairing  up  now," 
he  was  at  first  inclined  to  think  that  he  had  cap- 
tured an  Americanism  hitherto  unknown  and 
delightfully  fresh ;  but  he  consulted  the  Century 
Dictionary,  only  to  find  that  it  was  a  Scoticism, 
—there  was  even  a  quotation  from  Stevenson's 
'  Inland  Voyage,  '—and  that  it  was  not  uncommon 
in  the  southwestern  states.  And  when  Captain 
Mahan  brought  out  the  difference  between  pre- 
paration for  war  and  preparedness  for  war,  this 
friend  was  ready  to  credit  the  naval  historian  with 
the  devising  not  only  of  a  most  valuable  distinc- 
tion but  also  of  a  most  useful  word;  but  a  dip 
into  the  Century  Dictionary  again  revealed  that 
a  Scotchman  had  not  waited  for  an  American  to 
use  the  word,  and  that  it  had  been  employed  by 
Bain,  not  even  as  tho  it  was  a  novelty. 

Once  in  the  pages  of  Hawthorne,  who  was 

affluent  in  words  and  artistically  adroit  in  his 

management  of  them,  I  met  a  phrase  that  pleased 

me  mightily,  "  a  beterogeny  of  things  " ;  and  I  find 

'54 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

heterogeny  duly  collected  in  the  Century  Dic- 
tionary but  without  any  quotation  from  Haw- 
thorne. Another  word  of  Hawthorne's  in  the 
'  Blithedale  Romance '  is  improvability :  "  In  my 
own  behalf,  I  rejoice  that  I  could  once  think 
better  of  the  world's  improvability  than  it  de- 
served." This  I  fancy  may  be  Hawthorne's  very 
own;  but  it  is  in  the  Century  Dictionary,  all 
the  same,  and  without  any  indication  of  its  origin. 
Quite  possibly  the  New  England  romancer  dis- 
interred it  from  some  forgotten  tome  of  the 
"somniferous  school  of  literature,"  as  he  had 
humorously  entitled  the  writings  of  his  theologi- 
cal ancestors. 

There  is  a  word  of  Abraham  Lincoln's  that  I 
long  for  the  right  to  use.  Mr.  Noah  Brooks  has 
recorded  that  he  once  heard  the  President  speak 
of  a  certain  man  as  interruptions.  This  adjective 
conveys  a  delicate  shade  of  meaning  not  discov- 
erable in  any  other;  it  may  not  be  inscribed  in 
the  bead-roll  of  the  King's  English,  but  it  was 
a  specimen  of  the  President's  English;  and  has 
any  Speech  from  the  Throne  in  this  century 
really  rivaled  the  force  and  felicity  of  the  Second 
Inaugural  ? 

It  was  not  the  liberator  of  the  negro  but  one  of 

the  freedmen  themselves  who  made  offhand  use 

of  a  delicious  word,  for  which  it  is  probably 

hopeless  for  us  to  expect  acceptance,  however 

>55 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

useful  the  new  term  might  prove.  During  a 
debate  in  the  legislature  of  South  Carolina  in  the 
Reconstruction  days,  a  sable  ally  of  the  carpet- 
baggers rose  to  repel  the  taunts  of  his  opponents, 
declaring  energetically  that  he  hurled  back  with 
scorn  all  their  insinuendos.  The  word  holds  a 
middle  ground  between  insinuation  and  innu- 
endo ;  and  between  the  two  it  has  scant  chance 
of  survival.  But  it  is  an  amusing  attempt,  for  all 
its  failure;  and  it  would  have  given  pleasure  to 
the  author  of  '  Alice  in  Wonderland.'  And  how 
many  of  Lewis  Carroll's  own  verbal  innovations, 
wantonly  manufactured  for  his  sport,  are  likely 
to  get  themselves  admitted  into  the  language  of 
literature  ?  Chortle  stands  the  best  chance  of 
them  all,  I  think;  and  I  believe  that  many  a  man 
has  said  that  he  chortled,  with  no  thought  of  the 
British  bard  who  ingeniously  devised  the  quaint 
vocable. 

So  Mr.  W.  S.  Gilbert's  burgle  seems  to  be  win- 
ning its  way  into  general  use.  At  first  those  who 
employed  it  followed  the  example  of  the  comic 
lyrist,  and  did  so  with  humorous  intent;  but  of 
late  it  is  beginning  to  serve  those  who  are  wholly 
devoid  of  humor.  Perhaps  the  verb  to  burgle 
(from  the  noun  burglar)  supplied  the  analogy  on 
which  was  made  the  verb  to  ush  (from  the  noun 
usher).  With  my  own  ears  I  once  heard  a  well- 
known  clergyman  in  New  York  express  the 
156 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

thanks  of  the  congregation  to  "  the  gentlemen 
who  usb  for  us." 

It  is  well  that  strange  uses  like  these  do  not 
win  early  acceptance  into  our  speech— that  there 
should  be  alert  challengers  at  the  portal  to  cry 
"Halt!"  and  to  examine  a  newcomer's  creden- 
tials. It  is  well  also  that  the  stranger  should 
have  leave  to  prove  his  usefulness  and  so  in  time 
gain  admittance  even  to  the  inner  sanctuary  of 
the  language.  John  Dryden  discussed  the  recep- 
tion into  English  of  new  words  and  phrases  with 
the  sturdy  common  sense  which  was  one  of  the 
characteristics  most  endearing  him  to  us  as  a  true 
type  of  the  man  of  letters  who  was  also  a  man  of 
the  world.  "It  is  obvious,"  he  wrote  in  his 
'Defense  of  the  Epilog,'  "that  we  have  admitted 
many,  some  of  which  we  wanted,  and  therefore 
our  language  is  the  richer  for  them,  as  it  would 
be  by  importation  of  bullion;  others  are  rather 
ornamental  than  necessary;  yet  by  their  admis- 
sion the  language  is  become  more  courtly  and 
our  thoughts  are  better  dressed." 

Historians  of  the  language  have  had  no  diffi- 
culty in  bringing  together  a  mass  of  quotations^ 
from  the  British  writers  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury to  show  that  they  were  then  possessed  of 
the  belief  that  it  was  feasible  and  necessary  to  set 
bounds  to  the  growth  of  English.  They  were 
afraid  that  the  changes  going  on  in  the  language 
»57 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

would  make  it  "  impossible  for  succeeding  ages 
to  read  or  appreciate  the  literature  produced." 
In  his  interesting  and  instructive  lecture  on  the 
'  Evolution  of  English  Lexicography,'  Dr.  Murray 
remarks  that  "  to  us  of  a  later  age,  with  our  fuller 
knowledge  of  the  history  of  language,  and  our 
wider  experience  of  its  fortunes,  when  it  has  to 
be  applied  to  entirely  new  fields  of  knowledge, 
such  as  have  been  opened  to  us  since  the  birth 
of  modern  science,  this  notion  seems  childlike 
and  pathetic.  But  it  was  eminently  characteris- 
tic of  the  eighteenth  century." 

It  is  small  wonder  therefore  that  this  absurd 
notion  infected  two  of  the  most  characteristic 
figures  of  the  eighteenth  century— Johnson  and 
Franklin.  Dr.  Johnson  set  forth  in  the  plan  of  his 
dictionary  that  "  one  great  end  of  this  undertak- 
ing is  to  fix  the  English  language."  Even  so 
shrewd  a  student  of  all  things  as  was  Franklin 
seems  to  have  accepted  this  current  fallacy. 
When  he  acknowledged  the  dedication  of  Noah 
Webster's  '  Dissertations  on  the  English  Lan- 
guage,' he  declared  that  he  could  not  "but  ap- 
plaud your  zeal  for  preserving  the  purity  of  our 
language,  both  in  its  expressions  and  pronuncia- 
tion." Then,  as  tho  to  prove  to  us,  once  for  all, 
the  futility  of  all  efforts  to  "  fix  the  language  " 
and  to  "preserve  its  purity,"  Franklin  picks  out 
half  a  dozen  novelties  of  phrase  and  begs  that 
158 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

Webster  will  use  his  "  authority  in  reprobating 
them."  Among  these  innovations  that  Franklin 
disapproved  of  are  improved,  noticed,  advocated, 
progressed,  and  opposed. 

This  letter  to  Webster  was  written  in  1789;  and 
already  in  1760  Franklin  had  yielded  to  certain  of 
David  Hume's  criticisms  upon  his  parts  of 
speech:  "I  thank  you  for  your  friendly  admoni- 
tion relating  to  some  unusual  words  in  the  pam- 
phlet. It  will  be  of  service  to  me.  The  pejorate 
and  the  colonize,  since  they  are  not  in  common 
use  here,  I  give  up  as  bad ;  for  certainly  in  writ- 
ings intended  for  persuasion  and  for  general  in- 
formation, one  cannot  be  too  clear;  and  every 
expression  in  the  least  obscure  is  a  fault.  The 
unshakable,  too,  tho  clear,  I  give  up  as  rather 
low.  The  introducing  new  words,  where  we 
are  already  possessed  of  old  ones  sufficiently 
expressive,  I  confess  must  be  generally  wrong, 
as  it  tends  to  change  the  language." 

With  all  his  intellect  and  all  his  insight  and  all 
his  common  sense— and  with  this  most  precious 
quality  Franklin  was  better  furnished  than  either 
Johnson  or  Dryden— he  could  not  foresee  that  to 
notice  and  to  advocate  and  to  colonize  were  words 
without  which  the  English  language  could  not  do 
its  work  in  the  world.  And  when  he  gives  up 
unshakable  "  as  rather  low  "  he  stands  confessed 
as  a  contemporary  of  the  men  whom  Fielding 

'59 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

and  Goldsmith  girded  at.  In  spite  of  the  exam- 
ple of  Steele  and  Addison,  in  spite  of  his  own 
vigorous  directness  in  '  Poor  Richard '  and  in  all 
his  political  pamphlets,  Franklin  feels  that  there 
is  and  that  there  ought  to  be  a  wide  gap  between 
the  English  that  is  spoken  and  the  English  that  is 
written.  He  did  not  perceive  that  spoken  Eng- 
lish, with  all  its  hazardous  expressions,  its 
clipped  words,  its  violent  metaphors,  its  pictur- 
esque slang,  its  slovenly  clumsiness,  is  none  the 
less  the  proving-ground  of  the  literary  vocabu- 
lary, which  is  forever  tending  to  self-exhaustion. 
Nobody  has  better  stated  the  wiser  attitude  of 
a  writer  toward  the  tools  of  his  trade  than  Pro- 
fessor Harry  Thurston  Peck  in  his  incisive  dis- 
cussion of '  What  is  Good  English  ?  '  He  begins 
by  noting  that  "  the  English  language,  as  a  whole, 
is  the  richest  of  all  modern  tongues,  and  it  is  not 
to  be  bounded  by  the  comparatively  narrow 
limits  of  its  literature.  There  exists,  as  well,  the 
easy,  fluent  usage  of  conversation,  and  there  is 
also  the  strong,  simple,  homely  speech  of  the 
common  people,  rooted  in  plain  Saxon,  smacking 
of  the  soil,  and  having  a  sturdy  power  about  it 
that  is  unsurpassable  for  downright  force  and 
blunt  directness."  And  Professor  Peck,  having 
pointed  out  how  an  artist  in  words  is  free  to 
avail  himself  of  the  term  he  needs  from  books  or 
from  life,  declares  that  "  the  writer  of  the  best 
160 


NEW   WORDS   AND   OLD 

English  is  he  whose  language  responds  exactly  to 
his  mood  and  thought,  now  thundering  and 
surging  with  the  majestic  words  whose  immedi- 
ate ancestry  is  Roman,  now  rippling  and  singing 
with  the  smooth  harmonies  of  later  speech,  now 
forging  ahead  with  the  irresistible  energy  of  the 
Saxon,  and  now  laughing  and  wantoning  in  the 
easy  lightness  of  our  modern  phrase." 
(1897-99) 


161 


VII 

THE  NATURALIZATION  OF 
FOREIGN  WORDS 


THE  NATURALIZATION  OF  FOREIGN 
WORDS 

WHEN  Taine  was  praising  that  earliest  of  an- 
alytical novels,  the  '  Princess  of  Cleves,'  he 
noted  the  simplicity  of  Madame  de  Lafayette's 
style.  "  Half  of  the  words  we  use  are  unknown 
to  Madame  de  Lafayette,"  he  declared.  "She 
is  like  the  painters  of  old,  who  could  make  every 
shade  with  only  five  or  six  colors."  And  he  as- 
serts that  "there  is  no  easier  reading"  than  this 
story  of  Madame  de  Lafayette's;  "a  child  could 
understand  without  effort  all  her  expressions  and 
all  her  phrases.  .  .  .  Nowadays  every  writer  is 
a  pedant,  and  every  style  is  obscure.  All  of  us 
have  read  three  or  four  centuries,  and  three  or 
four  literatures.  Philosophy,  science,  art,  criti- 
cism have  weighted  us  with  their  discoveries 
and  their  jargons." 

This  is  true  enough,  no  doubt;  and  one  of  the 
strange  phenomenons  of  the  nineteenth  century 
was  the  sudden  and  enormous  swelling  of  our 
vocabularies.  Perhaps  the  distention  of  the  dic- 
tionary is  even  more  obvious  in  English  than  in 
French,  for  there  are  now  three  times  as  many 
165 


THE  NATURALIZATION   OF  FOREIGN  WORDS 

human  beings  using  the  language  of  Shakspere 
as  there  are  now  using  the  language  of  Moliere; 
and  while  the  speakers  of  French  are  compacted 
in  one  country  and  take  their  tone  from  its  cap- 
ital, the  speakers  of  English  are  scattered  in  the 
four  quarters  of  the  earth,  and  they  use  each 
man  his  own  speech  in  his  own  fashion.  From 
the  wider  variety  of  interests  among  those  who 
speak  English,  our  language  is  perforce  more 
hospitable  to  foreign  words  than  French  needs  to 
be,  since  it  is  used  rather  by  a  conservative  peo- 
ple who  prefer  to  stay  at  home. 

Perhaps  the  French  are  at  times  even  too  in- 
hospitable to  the  foreign  phrase.  A  friend  of 
mine  who  came  to  the  reading  of  M.  Paul  Bour- 
get's  'Essais  de  Psychologie  Contemporaine,' 
fresh  from  the  perusal  of  the  German  philoso- 
phers, told  me  that  he  was  pained  by  M.  Bour- 
get's  vain  effort  to  express  the  thoughts  the 
French  author  had  absorbed  from  the  Germans. 
It  seemed  as  tho  M.  Bourget  were  struggling  for 
speech,  and  could  not  say  what  was  in  his  mind 
for  lack  of  words  in  his  native  tongue  capable  of 
conveying  his  meaning.  Of  course  it  must  be 
remembered  that  German  philosophy  is  vague 
and  fluctuating,  and  that  the  central  thought  is 
often  obscured  by  a  penumbra,  while  French  is 
the  most  precise  of  languages.  Those  who  are 
proud  of  it  have  declared  that  what  is  not  clear 
166 


THE  NATURALIZATION  OF   FOREIGN  WORDS 

is  not  French.  When  Hegel  was  asked  by  a 
traveler  from  Paris  for  a  succinct  statement  of  his 
system  of  philosophy,  he  smiled  and  answered 
that  it  could  not  be  explained  summarily  — 
"especially  in  French!" 

The  English  language  extends  a  warmer  wel- 
come to  the  foreign  term,  and  also  exercises  more 
freely  its  right  to  make  a  word  for  itself  when- 
ever one  is  needed.  The  manufactured  article  is 
not  always  satisfactory,  but  if  it  gets  into  general 
use,  no  further  evidence  is  required  that  it  was 
made  to  supply  a  genuine  want.  Scientist,  for 
example,  is  an  ugly  word  (altho  an  invention  of 
Whewell's),  and  yet  it  was  needed.  How  neces- 
sary it  was  can  be  seen  by  any  reader  of  the  late 
F.  W.  H.  Myers's  essay  on  '  Science  and  a  Future 
Life,'  who  notes  that  Myers  refused  resolutely 
to  use  it,  altho  it  conveys  exactly  the  meaning 
the  author  wanted,  and  that  the  British  writer 
preferred  to  employ  instead  the  French  savant, 
which  does  not — etymologically  at  least  —  con- 
tain his  full  intention.  Myers's  fastidiousness 
did  not,  however,  prevent  his  using  creation- 
ist as  an  adjective,  and  also  bonism  as  a  substitute 
for  optimism,  "with  no  greater  barbarism  in  the 
form  of  the  word  and  more  accuracy  in  the 
meaning." 

Just  as  Myers  used  savant  so  Ruskin  was  will- 
ing to  arrest  the  rhythm  of  a  fine  passage  by  the 
167 


THE  NATURALIZATION   OF   FOREIGN   WORDS 

obtrusion  of  two  French  words  :  "  A  well-edu- 
cated gentleman  may  not  know  many  languages ; 
may  not  be  able  to  speak  any  but  his  own  ;  may 
have  read  very  few  books.  But  whatever  lan- 
guage he  knows,  he  knows  precisely;  whatever 
word  he  pronounces,  he  pronounces  rightly  ; 
above  all,  he  is  learned  in  the  peerage  of  words  ; 
knows  the  words  of  true  descent  and  ancient 
blood  at  a  glance  from  words  of  modern  ca- 
naille ;  remembers  all  their  ancestry,  their  inter- 
marriages, distantest  relationships,  and  the  ex- 
tent to  which  they  were  admitted,  and  offices 
they  hold  among  the  national  noblesse  of  words, 
at  any  time  and  in  any  country."  There  seems 
to  be  little  or  no  excuse  for  the  employment  here 
of  noblesse  =  nobility  ;  and  as  for  canaille,  per- 
haps Ruskin  held  that  to  be  a  French  word  on 
the  way  to  become  an  English  word  —  a  natural- 
ization not  likely  to  take  place  without  a  marked 
modification  of  the  original  pronunciation,  which 
is  difficult  for  the  English  mouth. 

Every  one  who  loves  good  English  cannot  but 
have  a  healthy  hatred  for  the  style  of  a  writer 
who  insists  on  bespattering  his  pages  with  alien 
words  and  foreign  phrases;  and  yet  we  are  more 
tolerant,  I  think,  toward  a  term  taken  from  one  of 
the  dead  languages  than  toward  one  derived  from 
any  of  the  living  tongues.  Probably  the  bishop 
who  liked  now  and  then  to  cite  a  Hebrew  sen- 
168 


THE   NATURALIZATION   OF   FOREIGN   WORDS 

tence  was  oversanguine  in  his  explanation  that 
"everybody  knows  a  little  Hebrew."  It  is  said 
that  even  a  Latin  quotation  is  now  no  longer 
certain  to  be  recognized  in  the  British  House  of 
Commons;  and  yet  it  was  a  British  statesman 
who  declared  that,  altho  there  was  no  necessity 
for  a  gentleman  to  know  Latin,  he  ought  at  least 
to  have  forgotten  it. 

For  a  bishop  to  quote  Hebrew  is  now  pedantic, 
no  doubt,  and  even  for  the  inferior  clergy  to 
quote  Latin.  It  is  pedantic,  but  it  is  not  indeco- 
rous; whereas  a  French  quotation  in  the  pulpit, 
or  even  the  use  of  a  single  French  word,  like 
savant,  for  example,  would  seem  to  most  of  us 
almost  a  breach  of  the  proprieties.  It  would 
strike  us,  perhaps,  not  merely  as  a  social  solecism, 
but  somehow  as  morally  reprehensible.  A 
preacher  who  habitually  cited  French  phrases 
would  be  in  danger  of  the  council.  To  picture 
Jonathan  Edwards  as  using  the  language  of  Vol- 
taire is  impossible.  That  a  French  quotation 
should  seem  more  incongruous  in  the  course  of 
a  religious  argument  than  a  Latin,  a  Greek,  or  a 
Hebrew  quotation,  is  perhaps  to  be  ascribed  to  the 
fact  that  many  of  us  hold  the  Parisians  to  be  a  more 
frivolous  people  than  the  Romans,  the  Athenians, 
or  the  Israelites;  and  as  the  essay  of  Mr.  Myers 
was  a  religious  argument,  this  may  be  one  reason 
why  his  employment  of  savant  was  unfortunate. 
169 


THE   NATURALIZATION   OF   FOREIGN   WORDS 

Another  reason  is  suggested  by  Professor 
Dowden's  shrewd  remark  that  "a  word,  like  a 
comet,  has  a  tail  as  well  as  a  head."  An  adroit 
craftsman  in  letters  is  careful  always  that  the 
connotations  of  the  terms  he  chooses  shall  be  in 
accord  with  the  tone  of  his  thesis.  It  may  be 
disputed  whether  savant  denotes  the  same  thing 
as  scientist,  but  it  can  hardly  be  denied  that 
the  connotations  of  the  two  words  are  wholly 
different.  For  my  own  part,  some  lingering 
memory  of  Abbott's  'Napoleon,'  absorbed  in 
boyhood,  links  the  wise  men  of  France  with 
the  donkeys  of  Egypt,  because  whenever  the 
Mameluke  cavalry  threatened  the  French  squares 
the  cry  went  up,  "Asses  and  savants  to  the 
center!" 

After  all,  it  is  perhaps  rather  a  question  whether 
or  not  savant  is  now  an  English  noun.  There 
are  many  French  words  knocking  at  the  door  of 
the  English  language  and  asking  for  admission. 
Is  littoral  for  shore  now  an  English  noun  ?  Is 
blond  an  English  adjective  meaning  light-hatred 
and  opposed  to  brunette  ?  Is  brunette  itself  really 
Anglicized  ?  (I  ask  this  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  a 
friend  of  mine  once  read  in  a  country  newspaper 
a  description  of  a  brunette  horse.)  Has  inedited 
for  unpublished  won  its  way  into  our  language 
finally  ?  Lowell  gave  it  his  warrant,  at  least  by 
using  it  in  his  '  Letters ' ;  but  I  confess  that  it  has 
170 


THE   NATURALIZATION   OF   FOREIGN  WORDS 

always  struck  me  as  liable  to   confusion  with 
unedited. 

Foreign  words  must  always  be  allowed  to 
land  on  our  coasts  without  a  passport;  yet  if  any 
of  them  linger  long  enough  to  warrant  a  belief 
that  they  may  take  out  their  papers  sooner  or 
later,  we  must  decide  at  last  whether  or  not  they 
are  likely  to  be  desirable  residents  of  our  diction- 
ary; and  if  we  determine  to  naturalize  them,  we 
may  fairly  enough  insist  on  their  renouncing  their 
foreign  allegiance.  They  must  cast  in  their  lot 
with  us  absolutely,  and  be  bound  by  our  laws 
only.  The  French  chaperon,  for  example,  has 
asked  for  admission  to  our  vocabulary,  and  the 
application  has  been  granted,  so  that  we  have 
now  no  hesitation  in  recording  that  Daisy  Miller 
was  chaperoned  by  Becky  Sharp  at  the  last  ball 
given  by  the  Marquis  of  Steyne;  and  we  have 
even  changed  the  spelling  of  the  noun  to  corre- 
spond better  with  our  Anglicized  pronunciation, 
thus  chaperone.  Thus  technique  has  changed  its 
name  to  tecbnic,  and  is  made  welcome;  so  early 
as  1867  Matthew  Arnold  used  technic  in  his 
'  Study  of  Celtic  Literature,'  but  even  now  his  fel- 
low-islanders are  slow  in  following  his  example. 
Thus  employe  is  accepted  in  the  properly  Angli- 
cized form  of  employee.  Thus  the  useful  cloture 
undergoes  a  sea-change  and  becomes  the  English 
closure.  And  why  not  cotery  also  ?  I  note  that 
171 


THE   NATURALIZATION   OF   FOREIGN   WORDS 

in  his  'Studies  in  Literature,'  published  in  1877, 
Professor  Dowden  put  technique  into  italics  as 
tho  it  was  still  a  foreign  word,  while  he  left 
coterie  in  ordinary  type  as  tho  it  had  been  adopted 
into  English. 

So  toilette  has  been  abbreviated  to  toilet ;  at 
least,  I  should  have  said  so  without  any  hesita- 
tion if  I  had  not  recently  seen  the  foreign  spelling 
reappearing  repeatedly  in  the  pages  of  Robert 
Louis  Stevenson's  'Amateur  Emigrant' — and 
this  in  the  complete  Edinburgh  edition  prepared 
by  Mr.  Sidney  Colvin.  To  find  a  Gallic  spelling 
in  the  British  prose  of  Stevenson  is  a  surprise, 
especially  since  the  author  of  the  '  Dynamiter'  is 
on  record  as  a  contemner  of  another  orthographic 
Gallicism.  In  a  foot-note  to  '  More  New  Arabian 
Nights '  Stevenson  declares  that  "any  writard 
who  writes  dynamitard  shall  find  in  me  a  never- 
resting  fightard." 

I  should  like  to  think  that  the  naturalized  litera- 
tor  was  supplanting  the  alien  litterateur,  but  I 
cannot  claim  confidence  as  to  the  result.  Litera- 
tor  is  a  good  English  word  :  I  have  found  it  in 
the  careful  pages  of  Lockhart's  '  Life  of  Scott '  ; 
and  I  make  no  doubt  that  it  can  prove  a  much 
older  pedigree  than  that.  It  seems  to  me  a  bet- 
ter word  by  far  than  literarian,  which  the  late 
Fitzedward  Hall  manufactured  for  his  own  use 
"some  time  in  the  fifties,"  and  which  he  de- 
172 


THE  NATURALIZATION   OF   FOREIGN   WORDS 

fended  against  a  British  critic  who  denounced 
it  as  "atrocious."  Hall,  praising  the  word  of 
his  own  making,  declared  that  "to  liter atus  or 
/iterator,  for  literary  person  or  a  longer  phrase 
of  equivalent  import,  there  are  obvious  objec- 
tions." Nobody,  to  the  best  of  my  belief,  ever 
attempted  to  use  in  English  the  Latin  literatus, 
altho  its  plural  Poe  made  us  familiar  with  by 
his  series  of  papers  on  the  '  Literati  of  America.' 
Since  Poe's  death  the  word  has  ceased  to  be  cur- 
rent, altho  it  was  not  uncommon  in  his  day. 

Perhaps  one  of  the  obvious  objections  to  liter- 
atus is  that  if  it  be  treated  as  an  English  word  the 
plural  it  forms  is  not  pleasant  to  the  ear  —  liter a- 
tuses.  Here,  indeed,  is  a  moot  point :  How 
does  a  foreign  word  make  its  plural  in  English  ? 
Some  years  ago  Mr.  C.  F.  Thwing,  writing  in 
Harper's  Ba^ar  on  the  college  education  of 
young  women,  spoke  of  foci.  Mr.  Churton 
Collins,  preparing  a  book  about  the  study  of 
English  literature  in  the  British  universities, 
expressed  his  desire  "to  raise  Greek,  now  gradu- 
ally falling  out  of  our  curricula  and  degenerating 
into  the  cachet  and  shibboleth  of  cliques  of  pe- 
dants, to  its  proper  place  in  education."  Here 
we  see  Mr.  Thwing  and  Mr.  Collins  treating 
focus  and  curriculum  as  words  not  yet  assimi- 
lated by  our  language,  and  therefore  required 
to  assume  the  Latin  plural. 
»73 


THE  NATURALIZATION   OF   FOREIGN   WORDS 

Does  not  this  suggest  a  certain  lack  of  taste  on 
the  part  of  these  writers  ?  If  focus  and  curricu- 
lum are  not  good  English  words,  what  need  is 
there  to  employ  them  when  you  are  using  the 
English  language  to  convey  your  thoughts  ? 
There  are  occasions,  of  course,  where  the  em- 
ployment of  a  foreign  term  is  justifiable,  but  they 
must  always  be  very  rare.  The  imported  word 
which  we  really  require  we  had  best  take  to 
ourselves,  incorporating  it  in  the  language,  treat- 
ing it  thereafter  absolutely  as  an  English  word,  and 
giving  it  the  regular  English  plural.  If  the  word 
we  use  is  so  foreign  that  we  should  print  it  in 
italics,  then  of  course  the  plural  should  be  formed 
according  to  the  rules  of  the  foreign  language 
from  which  it  has  been  borrowed  ;  but  if  it  has 
become  so  acclimated  in  our  tongue  that  we 
should  not  think  of  underlining  it,  then  surely  it 
is  English  enough  to  take  an  English  plural.  If 
cherub  is  now  English,  its  plural  is  the  English 
cherubs,  and  not  the  Hebrew  cherubim.  If  cri- 
terion is  now  English,  its  plural  is  the  English 
criterions,  and  not  the  Greek  criteria,  If  formula 
is  now  English,  its  plural  is  the  English  formulas, 
and  not  the  Latin  formula.  If  bureau  is  now 
English,  its  plural  is  the  English  bureaus,  and 
not  the  French  bureaux. 

What  is  the  proper  plural  in  English  of  cactus? 
of  vortex  ?  of  antithesis  ?  of  phenomenon  ?  In  a 

•74 


THE  NATURALIZATION   OF   FOREIGN   WORDS 

volume  on  the  'Augustan  Age,'  in  Professor 
George  Saintsbury's  '  Periods  of  European  Litera- 
ture,'we  find  lexica  —  a  masterpiece  of  petty 
pedantry  and  of  pedantic  pettiness.  As  Landor 
made  himself  say  in  his  dialog  with  Archdeacon 
Hare,  "There  is  an  affectation  of  scholarship  in 
compilers  of  spelling-books,  and  in  the  authors 
they  follow  for  examples,  when  they  bring  for- 
ward phenomena  and  the  like.  They  might  as 
well  bring  forward  mysteria.  We  have  no  right 
to  tear  Greek  and  Latin  declensions  out  of  their 
grammars:  we  need  no  "vortices  when  we  have 
•vortexes  before  us ;  and  while  we  have  memoran- 
dums, factotums,  and  ultimatums,  let  our  shep- 
herd dogs  bring  back  to  us  by  the  ear  such  as 
have  wandered  from  the  flock." 

Lander's  own  scholarship  was  too  keen  and 
his  taste  was  too  fine  for  him  not  to  abhor  such  af- 
fectation. He  held  that  Greek  and  Latin  words 
had  no  business  in  an  English  sentence  unless 
they  had  been  frankly  acclimated  in  the  English 
language,  and  that  one  of  the  conditions  of  this 
acclimatizing  was  the  shedding  of  their  original 
plurals.  And  that  this  is  also  the  common-sense 
view  of  most  users  of  English  is  obvious  enough. 
Nobody  now  ventures  to  write  factota  or  ulti- 
mata ;  and  even  memoranda  seems  to  be  vanish- 
ing. But  phenomena  and  data  still  survive;  and 
so  do  errata  and  candelabra.  Whatever  may 

«75 


THE  NATURALIZATION   OF   FOREIGN   WORDS 

be  the  fate  of  phenomena,  that  of  the  three  other 
words  may  perhaps  be  like  unto  the  fate  of  opera 
—  which  is  also  a  Latin  plural  and  which  has 
become  an  English  singular.  We  speak  unhesi- 
tatingly of  the  operas  of  Rossini ;  are  we  going, 
in  time,  to  speak  unhesitatingly  of  the  cande- 
labras  of  Cellini  ?  In  his  vigorous  article  on  the 
orthography  of  the  French  language  —  which  is 
still  almost  as  chaotic  and  illogical  as  the  orthog- 
raphy of  the  English  language  —  Sainte-Beuve 
noted  as  a  singular  peculiarity  the  fact  that  errata 
had  got  itself  recognized  as  a  French  singular, 
but  that  it  did  not  yet  take  the  French  plural; 
thus  we  see  un  errata  and  des  errata. 

It  is  true  also  that  when  we  take  over  a  term 
from  another  language  we  ought  to  be  sure 
that  it  really  exists  in  the  other  language.  For 
lack  of  observance  of  this  caution  we  find  our- 
selves now  in  possession  of  phrases  like  nom 
de  plume  and  deshabille,  of  which  the  French 
never  heard.  And  even  when  we  have  assured 
ourselves  of  the  existence  of  the  word  in  the 
foreign  language,  it  behooves  us  then  to  as- 
sure ourselves  also  of  its  exact  meaning  before  we 
take  it  for  our  own.  In  his  interesting  and  in- 
structive book  about  'English  Prose,'  Professor 
Earle  reminds  us  that  the  French  of  Stratford-atte- 
Bowe  is  not  yet  an  extinct  species;  and  he  adds 
in  a  note  that  "the  word  lev^e  seems  to  be  another 
176 


THE   NATURALIZATION   OF   FOREIGN   WORDS 

genuine  instance  of  the  same  insular  dialect," 
since  it  is  not  French  of  any  date,  but'an  English 
improvement  upon  the  verb  (or  substantive) 
lever,  "getting  up  in  the  morning." 

An  example  even  more  extraordinary  than  any 
of  these,  I  think,  will  occur  to  those  of  us  who 
are  in  the  habit  of  glancing  through  the  theatrical 
announcements  of  the  American  newspapers. 
This  is  the  taking  of  the  French  word  vaudeville 
to  designate  what  was  once  known  as  a  "variety 
show  "  and  what  is  now  more  often  called  a 
"specialty  entertainment."  For  any  such  inter- 
pretation of  -vaudeville  there  is  no  warrant  what- 
ever in  French.  Originally  the  "vaudeville" 
was  a  satiric  ballad,  bristling  with  hits  at  the 
times,  and  therefore  closely  akin  to  the  "topical 
song "  of  to-day ;  and  it  is  at  this  stage  of  its 
evolution  that  Boileau  asserted  that 

Le  Franfais,  ne  malm,  crea  le  vaudeville. 

In  time  there  came  to  be  spoken  words  accom- 
panying those  sung,  and  thus  the  "vaudeville" 
expanded  slowly  into  a  little  comic  play  in  which 
there  were  one  or  more  songs.  Of  late  the 
Parisian  "vaudeville"  has  been  not  unlike  the 
London  "  musical  farce."  At  no  stage  of  its  ca- 
reer had  the  "vaudeville"  anything  to  do  with 
the  "variety  show";  and  yet  to  the  average 
American  to-day  the  two  words  seem  synony- 
177 


THE   NATURALIZATION   OF   FOREIGN   WORDS 

mous.  There  was  even  organized  in  New  York, 
in  the  fall  of  1892,  a  series  of  subscription  sup- 
pers during  which  "specialty  entertainments" 
were  to  be  given;  and  in  spite  of  the  fact  that 
the  organizers  were  presumably  persons  who  had 
traveled,  they  called  their  society  the  "Vaude- 
ville Club,"  altho  no  real  "vaudeville"  was  ever 
presented  before  the  members  during  its  brief 
and  inglorious  career.  Of  course  explanation 
and  protest  are  now  equally  futile.  The  mean- 
ing of  the  word  is  forever  warped  beyond  cor- 
rection; and  for  the  future  here  in  America  a 
"vaudeville  performance"  is  a  "variety  show," 
no  matter  what  it  may  be  or  may  have  been  in 
France.  When  the  people  as  a  whole  accept  a 
word  as  having  a  certain  meaning,  that  is  and 
must  be  the  meaning  of  the  word  thereafter; 
and  there  is  no  use  in  kicking  against  the  pricks. 
The  fate  in  English  of  another  French  term  is 
even  now  trembling  in  the  balance.  This  is  the 
word  nte.  The  French  have  found  a  way  out  of 
the  difficulty  of  indicating  easily  the  maiden  name 
of  a  married  woman ;  they  write  unhesitatingly 
about  Madame  Machin,  nee  Chose;  and  the  Ger- 
mans have  a  like  idiom.  But  instead  of  taking  a 
hint  from  the  French  and  the  Germans,  and  thus 
of  speaking  about  Mrs.  Brown,  born  Gray,  as  they 
do,  not  a  few  English  writers  have  simply  bor- 
rowed the  actual  French  word,  and  so  we  read 
178 


THE   NATURALIZATION  OF   FOREIGN   WORDS 

about  Mrs.  Black,  ne'e  White.  As  usual,  this  bor- 
rowing is  dangerous;  and  the  temptation  seems 
to  be  irresistible  to  destroy  the  exact  meaning  of 
ne'e  by  using  it  in  the  sense  of ' '  formerly. "  Thus 
in  the  'Letters  of  Matthew  Arnold,  1848-88, 'col- 
lected and  arranged  by  Mr.  George  W.  E.  Russell, 
the  editor  supplies  in  foot-notes  information  about 
the  persons  whose  names  appear  in  the  corre- 
spondence. In  one  of  these  annotations  we  read 
that  the  wife  of  Sir  Anthony  de  Rothschild  was 
"  ne'e  Louisa  Montefiore"  (i.  165),  and  in  another 
that  the  Hon.  Mrs.  Eliot  Yorke  was  "  nte  Annie 
de  Rothschild"  (ii.  160).  Now,  neither  of  these 
ladies  was  born  with  a  given  name  as  well  as 
a  family  name.  It  is  obvious  that  the  editor 
has  chosen  arbitrarily  to  wrench  the  meaning 
of  nee  to  suit  his  own  convenience,  a  proceed- 
ing of  which  I  venture  to  think  that  Mat- 
thew Arnold  himself  would  certainly  have  dis- 
approved. In  fact,  I  doubt  if  Mr.  Russell  is  not 
here  guilty  of  an  absurdity  almost  as  obvious  as 
that  charged  against  a  wealthy  western  lady  now 
residing  at  the  capital  of  the  United  States,  who 
is  said  to  have  written  her  name  on  the  register  of 
a  New  York  hotel  thus:  "  Mrs.  Blank,  Washing- 
ton, ne'e  Chicago." 

Why  is  it  that  the  wandering  stars  of  the  the- 
atrical firmament  are  wont  to  display  themselves 
in  a  rtpertoire  when  it  would  be  so  much  easier 
179 


THE   NATURALIZATION    OF   FOREIGN   WORDS 

for  them  to  make  use  of  a  repertory  ?  And  why 
does  the  teacher  of  young  and  ambitious  singers 
insist  on  calling  his  school  a  conservatoire  when 
it  would  assert  its  rank  just  as  well  if  it  was 
known  as  a  conservatory  ?  What  strange  freak 
of  chance  has  led  so  many  of  the  women  who 
have  made  themselves  masters  of  the  technic  of 
the  piano  to  announce  themselves  as  pianistes  in 
the  vain  belief  that  pianiste  is  the  feminine  of 
pianist?  How  comes  it  that  a  man  capable  of 
composing  so  scholarly  a  book  as  the  'Greek 
Drama '  of  Mr.  Lionel  D.  Barnett  really  is  should 
be  guilty  of  saying  that  certain  declamations  in 
the  later  theater  "  were  adapted  to  the  style  of 
popular  artistes"  ?  And  why  does  Mr.  Andrew 
Lang  (in  his  '  Angling  Sketches ')  write  about  the 
aspbalte,  when  the  obvious  English  is  either 
aspbalt  or  asphaltum  ? 

And  yet  Mr.  Lang,  himself  convicted  of  this 
dereliction,  has  no  hesitation  in  objecting  to  a 
"  delightful  grammatical  form  which  closes  a 
scene  in  one  of  the  new  rag-bag  journals.  The 
author  gets  his  characters  off  the  stage  with  the 
announcement:  'They  exit.'  He  seems  to  think 
that  exit  is  a  verb.  I  exit,  he  exits,  they  exit.  It 
would  be  interesting  to  learn  how  he  translates 
exeunt  omnes.  One  is  accustomed  to  '  a  penetra- 
lia' from  young  lions,  and  to  'a  strata,'  but 
'they  exit'  is  original." 

180 


THE   NATURALIZATION   OF   FOREIGN  WORDS 

But  the  verb  to  exit  is  not  original  with  the 
writer  in  the  new  rag-bag  journal.  It  has  been 
current  in  England  for  three  quarters  of  a  century 
at  least,  and  it  can  be  found  in  the  pages  of  that 
vigorously  written  pair  of  volumes,  Mrs.  Trol- 
lope's  'Domestic  Manners  of  the  Americans' 
(published  in  1831),  in  the  picturesque  passage  in 
which  she  describes  how  the  American  women, 
left  alone,  "all  console  themselves  together  for 
whatever  they  may  have  suffered  in  keeping 
awake  by  taking  more  tea,  coffee,  hot  cake 
and  custard,  hoe-cake,  johnny-cake,  waffle-cake 
and  dodger-cake,  pickled  peaches  and  preserved 
cucumbers,  ham,  turkey,  hung-beef,  apple-sauce, 
and  pickled  oysters,  than  ever  were  prepared  in 
any  other  country  of  the  known  world.  After 
this  massive  meal  is  over,  they  return  to  the 
drawing-room,  and  it  always  appeared  to  me 
that  they  remained  together  as  long  as  they  could 
bear  it,  and  then  they  rise  en  masse,  cloak,  bonnet, 
shawl,  and  exit." 

The  verb  to  exit,  with  the  full  conjugation  Mr. 
Lang  thought  so  strange,  has  long  been  common 
among  theatrical  folk.  The  stage-manager  will 
tell  the  leading  lady  "You  exit  here,  and  she  ex- 
its up  left."  The  theatrical  folk,  who  probably 
first  brought  the  verb  into  use,  did  not  borrow  it 
from  the  Latin,  as  Mr.  Lang  seems  to  suppose  ; 
they  simply  made  a  verb  of  the  existing  English 
181 


THE  NATURALIZATION   OF   FOREIGN   WORDS 

noun  exit,  meaning  a  way  out.  We  old  New- 
Yorkers  who  can  recall  the  time  when  Barnum's 
Museum  stood  at  the  corner  of  Broadway  and 
Ann  Street,  remember  also  the  signs  which  used 
to  declare 


THIS   WAY 

TO  THE 

GRAND   EXIT 


and  we  have  not  forgotten  the  facile  anecdote  of 
the  countryman  who  went  wonderingly  to  dis- 
cover what  manner  of  strange  beast  the  "exit" 
might  be,  and  who  unexpectedly  found  himself 
in  the  street  outside. 

The  unfortunate  remark  of  Mr.  Lang  was  due 
to  his  happening  not  to  recall  the  fact  that  exit 
had  become,  first,  an  English  noun,  and,  sec- 
ond, an  English  verb.  When  once  it  was  An- 
glicized, it  had  all  the  rights  of  a  native  ;  it  was 
a  citizen  of  no  mean  country.  The  principle 
which  it  is  well  to  keep  in  mind  in  any  con- 
sideration of  the  position  in  English  of  terms 
once  foreign  is  that  no  word  can  serve  two 
masters.  The  English  language  is  ever  rav- 
enous and  voracious  ;  its  appetite  is  insatiable. 
It  is  forever  taking  over  words  from  strange 
tongues,  dead  and  alive.  These  words  are  but 
182 


THE   NATURALIZATION   OF   FOREIGN   WORDS 

borrowed  at  first,  and  must  needs  conform  to 
all  the  grammatical  peculiarities  of  their  native 
speech.  But  some  of  them  are  sooner  or  later 
firmly  incorporated  into  English  ;  and  thereafter 
they  must  cease  to  obey  any  laws  but  those  of 
the  language  into  which  they  have  been  adopted. 
Either  a  word  is  English  or  it  is  not  ;  and  a  de- 
cision on  this  point  is  rarely  difficult. 
(1895-1900) 


183 


VIII 
THE  FUNCTION  OF   SLANG 


THE   FUNCTION  OF  SLANG 

IT  is  characteristic  of  the  interest  which  science 
is  now  taking  in  things  formerly  deemed 
unworthy  of  consideration  that  philologists  no 
longer  speak  of  slang  in  contemptuous  terms. 
Perhaps,  indeed,  it  was  not  the  scholar,  but  the 
amateur  philologist,  the  mere  literary  man,  who 
affected  to  despise  slang.  To  the  trained  inves- 
tigator into  the  mutations  of  language  and  into 
the  transformations  of  the  vocabulary,  no  word 
is  too  humble  for  respectful  consideration ;  and  it 
is  from  the  lowly,  often,  that  the  most  valuable 
lessons  are  learned.  But  until  recently  few  men 
of  letters  ever  mentioned  slang  except  in  dispar- 
agement and  with  a  wish  for  its  prompt  extirpa- 
tion. Even  professed  students  of  speech,  like 
Trench  and  Alford  (now  sadly  shorn  of  their 
former  authority),  are  abundant  in  declarations 
of  abhorrent  hostility.  DeQuincey,  priding  him- 
self on  his  independence  and  on  his  iconoclasm, 
was  almost  alone  in  saying  a  good  word  for 
slang. 

187 


THE   FUNCTION  OF  SLANG 

There  is  this  excuse  for  the  earlier  author  who 
treated  slang  with  contumely,  that  the  differen- 
tiation of  slang  from  cant  was  not  complete  in 
his  day.  Cant  is  the  dialect  of  a  class,  often 
used  correctly  enough,  as  far  as  grammar  is  con- 
cerned, but  often  also  unintelligible  to  those  who 
do  not  belong  to  the  class  or  who  are  not  ac- 
quainted with  its  usages.  Slang  was  at  first  the 
cant  of  thieves,  and  this  seems  to  have  been  its 
only  meaning  until  well  into  the  present  century. 
In  'Redgauntlet,'  for  example,  published  in  1824, 
Scott  speaks  of  the  "thieves'  Latin  called  slang." 
Sometime  during  the  middle  of  the  century 
slang  seems  to  have  lost  this  narrow  limitation, 
and  to  have  come  to  signify  a  word  or  a  phrase 
used  with  a  meaning  not  recognized  in  polite 
letters,  either  because  it  had  just  been  invented, 
or  because  it  had  passed  out  of  memory.  While 
cant,  therefore,  was  a  language  within  a  language, 
so  to  speak,  and  not  to  be  understanded  of  the 
people,  slang  was  a  collection  of  colloquialisms 
gathered  from  all  sources,  and  all  bearing  alike 
the  bend  sinister  of  illegitimacy. 

Certain  of  its  words  were  unquestionably  of 
very  vulgar  origin,  being  survivals  of  the  "thieves' 
Latin  "  Scott  wrote  about.  Among  these  are  pal 
and  cove,  words  not  yet  admitted  to  the  best 
society.  Others  were  merely  arbitrary  misap- 
plications of  words  of  good  repute,  such  as  the 

188 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

employment  of  awfully  and  jolly  as  synonyms 
for  "very — as  intensives,  in  short.  Yet  others 
were  violent  metaphors,  like  in  the  soup,  kicking 
the  bucket,  holding  up  (a  stage-coach).  Others, 
again,  were  the  temporary  phrases  which  spring 
up,  one  scarcely  knows  how,  and  flourish  unac- 
countably for  a  few  months,  and  then  disappear 
forever,  leaving  no  sign ;  such  as  shoo-fly  in 
America  and  all  serene  in  England. 

An  analysis  of  modern  slang  reveals  the  fact 
that  it  is  possible  to  divide  the  words  and  phrases 
of  which  it  is  composed  into  four  broad  classes, 
of  quite  different  origin  and  of  very  varying  value. 
Toward  two  of  these  classes  it  may  be  allowable 
to  feel  the  contempt  so  often  expressed  for  slang 
as  a  whole.  Toward  the  other  two  classes  such  a 
feeling  is  wholly  unjustifiable,  for  they  are  per- 
forming an  inestimable  service  to  the  language. 

Of  the  two  unworthy  classes,  the  first  is  that 
which  includes  the  survivals  of  the  "thieves' 
Latin,"  the  vulgar  terms  used  by  vulgar  men  to 
describe  vulgar  things.  This  is  the  slang  which 
the  police-court  reporter  knows  and  is  fond  of 
using  profusely.  This  is  the  slang  which  Dick- 
ens introduced  to  literature.  This  class  of  slang 
it  is  which  is  mainly  responsible  for  the  ill  repute 
of  the  word.  Much  of  the  dislike  for  slang  felt 
by  people  of  delicate  taste  is,  however,  due  to 
the  second  class,  which  includes  the  ephemeral 
189 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

phrases  fortuitously  popular  for  a  season,  and 
then  finally  forgotten  once  for  all.  These  mere 
catchwords  of  the  moment  are  rarely  foul,  as  the 
words  and  phrases  of  the  first  class  often  are,  but 
they  are  unfailingly  foolish.  There  you  go  -with 
your  eye  out,  which  was  accepted  as  a  humorous 
remark  in  London,  and  Where  did  you  get  that 
hat?  which  had  a  like  fleeting  vogue  in  New 
York,  are  phrases  as  inoffensive  as  they  are  flat. 
These  temporary  terms  come  and  go,  and  are 
forgotten  swiftly.  Probably  most  readers  of 
Forcythe  Wilson's  '  Old  Sergeant '  need  now  to 
have  it  explained  to  them  that  during  the  war  a 
grape-vine  meant  a  lying  rumor. 

It  must  be  said,  however,  that  even  In  the 
terms  of  the  first  class  there  is  a  striving  upward, 
a  tendency  to  disinfect  themselves,  as  any  reader 
of  Grose's  '  Dictionary  of  the  Vulgar  Tongue ' 
must  needs  remark  when  he  discovers  that 
phrases  used  now  with  perfect  freedom  had  a 
secret  significance  in  the  last  century.  There 
are  also  innuendos  not  a  few  in  certain  of  Shak- 
spere's  best-known  plays  which  fortunately  es- 
cape the  notice  of  all  but  the  special  student  of 
the  Elizabethan  vocabulary. 

The  other  two  classes  of  slang  stand  on  a  dif- 
ferent footing.  Altho  they  suffer  from  the  stig- 
ma attached  to  all  slang  by  the  two  classes 
already  characterized,  they  serve  a  purpose.  In- 
190 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

deed,  their  utility  is  indisputable,  and  it  was 
never  greater  than  it  is  to-day.  One  of  these 
classes  consists  of  old  and  forgotten  phrases  or 
words,  which,  having  long  lain  dormant,  are 
now  struggling  again  to  the  surface.  The  other 
consists  of  new  words  and  phrases,  often  vigor- 
ous and  expressive,  but  not  yet  set  down  in  the 
literary  lexicon,  and  still  on  probation.  In  these 
two  classes  we  find  a  justification  for  the  exist- 
ence of  slang  —  for  it  is  the  function  of  slang  to  be 
a  feeder  of  the  vocabulary.  Words  get  thread- 
bare and  dried  up;  they  come  to  be  like  evapo- 
rated fruit,  juiceless  and  tasteless.  Now  it  is  the 
duty  of  slang  to  provide  substitutes  for  the  good 
words  and  true  which  are  worn  out  by  hard 
service.  And  many  of  the  recruits  slang  has 
enlisted  are  worthy  of  enrolment  among  the 
regulars.  When  a  blinded  conservative  is  called 
a  mossback,  who  is  so  dull  as  not  to  perceive  the 
poetry  of  the  word  ?  When  an  actor  tells  us 
how  the  traveling  company  in  which  he  was 
engaged  got  stranded,  who  does  not  recognize 
the  force  and  the  felicity  of  the  expression  ?  And 
when  we  hear  a  man  declare  that  he  would  to- 
day be  rich  if  only  his  foresight  had  been  equal 
to  his  hindsight,  who  is  not  aware  of  the  value 
of  the  phrase  ?  No  wonder  is  it  that  the  verbal 
artist  hankers  after  such  words  which  renew  the 
lexicon  of  youth!  No  wonder  is  it  that  the 
191 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

writer  who  wishes  to  present  his  thought  freshly 
seeks  these  words  with  the  bloom  yet  on  them, 
and  neglects  the  elder  words  desiccated  as  tho 
for  preservation  in  a  herbarium ! 

The  student  of  slang  is  surprised  that  he  is 
able  to  bring  forward  an  honorable  pedigree  for 
many  words  so  long  since  fallen  from  their  high 
estate  that  they  are  now  treated  as  upstarts  when 
they  dare  to  assert  themselves.  Words  have 
their  fates  as  well  as  men  and  books;  and  the 
ups  and  downs  of  a  phrase  are  often  almost  as 
pathetic  as  those  of  a  man.  It  has  been  said  that 
the  changes  of  fortune  are  so  sudden  here  in 
these  United  States  that  it  is  only  three  genera- 
tions from  shirt  sleeves  to  shirt  sleeves.  The 
English  language  is  not  quite  so  fast  as  the  Amer- 
ican people,  but  in  the  English  language  it  is 
only  three  centuries  from  shirt  sleeves  to  shirt 
sleeves.  What  could  seem  more  modern,  more 
western  even,  than  deck  for  pack  of  cards,  and  to 
lay  out  or  to  lay  out  cold  for  to  knockdown?  Yet 
these  are  both  good  old  expressions,  in  decay  no 
longer,  but  now  insisting  on  their  right  to  a  re- 
newed life.  Deck  is  Elizabethan,  and  we  find  in 
Shakspere's  'King  Henry  VI.'  (part  iii.,  act  v., 
sc.  i.)  that 

The  king  was  slyly  finger'd  from  the  deck. 

To  lay  out  in  its  most  modern  sense  is  very  early 

English. 

192 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

Even  more  important  than  this  third  class  of 
slang  expressions  is  the  fourth,  containing  the 
terms  which  are,  so  to  speak,  serving  their  ap- 
prenticeship, and  as  yet  uncertain  whether  or 
not  they  will  be  admitted  finally  into  the  gild 
of  good  English.  These  terms  are  either  useful 
or  useless ;  they  either  satisfy  a  need  or  they  do 
not;  they  therefore  live  or  die  according  to  the 
popular  appreciation  of  their  value.  If  they  ex- 
pire, they  pass  into  the  limbo  of  dead-and-gone 
slang,  than  which  there  is  no  blacker  oblivion.  If 
they  survive  it  is  because  they  have  been  received 
into  the  literary  language,  having  appealed  to  the 
perceptions  of  some  master  of  the  art  and  craft 
of  speech,  under  whose  sponsorship  they  are  ad- 
mitted to  full  rights.  Thus  we  see  that  slang  is 
a  training-school  for  new  expressions,  only  the 
best  scholars  getting  the  diploma  which  confers 
longevity,  the  others  going  surely  to  their  fate. 

Sometimes  these  new  expressions  are  words 
only,  sometimes  they  are  phrases.  To  go  back 
on,  for  instance,  and  to  give  one's  self  away  are 
specimens  of  the  phrase  characteristic  of  this 
fourth  and  most  interesting  class  of  slang  at  its 
best.  In  its  creation  of  phrases  like  these,  slang 
is  what  idiom  was  before  language  stiffened  into 
literature,  and  so  killed  its  earlier  habit  of  idiom- 
making.  After  literature  has  arrived,  and  after 
the  schoolmaster  is  abroad,  and  after  the  print- 

'93 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

ing-press  has  been  set  up  in  every  hamlet,  the 
idiom-making  faculty  of  a  language  is  atrophied 
by  disuse.  Slang  is  sometimes,  and  to  a  certain 
extent,  a  survival  of  this  faculty,  or  at  least  a 
substitute  for  its  exercise.  In  other  words  (and 
here  I  take  the  liberty  of  quoting  from  a  private 
letter  of  one  of  the  foremost  authorities  on  the 
history  of  English,  Professor  Lounsbury),  "slang 
is  an  effort  on  the  part  of  the  users  of  language 
to  say  something  more  vividly,  strongly,  con- 
cisely than  the  language  as  existing  permits  it  to 
be  said";  and  he  adds  that  slang  is  therefore 
"the  source  from  which  the  decaying  energies 
of  speech  are  constantly  refreshed." 

Being  contrary  to  the  recognized  standards  of 
speech,  slang  finds  no  mercy  at  the  hands  of 
those  who  think  it  their  duty  to  uphold  the  strict 
letter  of  the  law.  Nothing  amazes  an  investiga- 
tor more,  and  nothing  more  amuses  him,  than 
to  discover  that  thousands  of  words  now  secure 
in  our  speech  were  once  denounced  as  interlo- 
pers. "There  is  death  in  the  dictionary,"  said 
Lowell,  in  his  memorable  linguistic  essay  pre- 
fixed to  the  second  series  of  the  '  Biglow  Papers ' ; 
"and  where  language  is  too  strictly  limited  by 
convention,  the  ground  for  expression  to  grow 
in  is  limited  also,  and  we  get  a  potted  literature 
—  Chinese  dwarfs  instead  of  healthy  trees." 
And  in  the  paper  on  Dryden  he  declared  that  "a 
'94 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

language  grows  and  is  not  made."  Pedants  are 
ever  building  the  language  about  with  rules  of 
iron  in  a  vain  effort  to  keep  it  from  growing 
naturally  and  according  to  its  needs. 

It  is  true  that  cab  and  mob  are  clipped  words, 
and  there  has  always  been  a  healthy  dislike  of  any 
clipping  of  the  verbal  currency.  But  consols 
is  firmly  established.  Two  clipped  words  there 
are  which  have  no  friends — gents  and  pants. 
Dr.  Holmes  has  put  them  in  the  pillory  of  a 
couplet: 

The  things  named  pants,  in  certain  documents, 
A  word  not  made  for  gentlemen,  but  gents. 

And  recently  a  sign,  suspended  outside  a  big 
Broadway  building,  announced  that  there  were 
"Hands  wanted  on  pants,"  the  building  being  a 
clothing  factory,  and  not,  as  one  might  suppose, 
a  boys'  school. 

The  slang  of  a  metropolis,  be  that  where  you 
will,  in  the  United  States  or  in  Great  Britain,  in 
France  or  in  Germany,  is  nearly  always  stupid. 
There  is  neither  fancy  nor  fun  in  the  Parisian's 
Obe  Lambert  or  on  dirait  du  veau,  nor  in  the 
Londoner's  all  serene  or  there  you  go  witb  your 
eye  out — catchwords  which  are  humorous,  if 
humorous  they  are,  only  by  general  consent  and 
for  some  esoteric  reason.  It  is  to  such  stupid 
phrases  of  a  fleeting  popularity  that  Dr.  Holmes 
•95 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

refers,  no  doubt,  when  he  declares  that  "the  use 
of  slang,  or  cheap  generic  terms,  as  a  substitute 
for  differentiated  specific  expressions  is  at  once  a 
sign  and  a  cause  of  mental  atrophy."  And  this 
use  of  slang  is  far  more  frequent  in  cities,  where 
people  often  talk  without  having  anything  to  say, 
than  in  the  country,  where  speech  flows  slowly. 
Perhaps  the  more  highly  civilized  a  population 
is,  the  more  it  has  parted  with  the  power  of  pic- 
torial phrase-making.  It  may  be  that  a  certain 
lawlessness  of  life  is  the  cause  of  a  lawlessness  of 
language.  Of  all  metropolitan  slang  that  of  the 
outlaws  is  most  vigorous.  It  was  after  Vidocq 
had  introduced  thieves'  slang  into  polite  society 
that  Balzac,  always  a  keen  observer  and  always 
alert  to  pick  up  unworn  words,  ventured  to  say, 
perhaps  to  the  astonishment  of  many,  that 
"there  is  no  speech  more  energetic,  more  colored, 
than  that  of  these  people. "  Balzac  was  not  aca- 
demic in  his  vocabulary,  and  he  owed  not  a  little 
of  the  sharpness  of  his  descriptions  to  his  hatred 
of  the  cut-and-dried  phrases  of  his  fellow-novel- 
ists. He  would  willingly  have  agreed  with 
Montaigne  when  the  essayist  declared  that  the 
language  he  liked,  written  or  spoken,  was  "a  suc- 
culent and  nervous  speech,  short  and  compact, 
not  so  much  delicated  and  combed  out  as  vehe- 
ment and  brusk,  rather  arbitrary  than  monoto- 
nous, .  .  .  not  pedantic,  but  soldierly  rather,  as 
196 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

Suetonius  called  Caesar's."     And  this  brings  us 
exactly  to  Mr.  Bret  Harte's 

Phrases  such  as  camps  may  teach, 
Saber-cuts  of  Saxon  speech, 

There  is  a  more  soldierly  frankness,  a  greater 
freedom,  less  restraint,  less  respect  for  law  and 
order,  in  the  west  than  in  the  east;  and  this  may 
be  a  reason  why  American  slang  is  superior  to 
British  and  to  French.  The  catchwords  of  New 
York  may  be  as  inept  and  as  cheap  as  the  catch- 
words of  London  and  of  Paris,  but  New  York  is 
not  as  important  to  the  United  States  as  London 
is  to  Great  Britain  and  as  Paris  is  to  France;  it  is 
not  as  dominating,  not  as  absorbing.  So  it  is 
that  in  America  the  feebler  catchwords  of  the  city 
give  way  before  the  virile  phrases  of  the  west. 
There  is  little  to  choose  between  the  bow  's your 
poor  feet?  of  London  and  the  well,  I  should  smile 
of  New  York,  for  neither  phrase  had  any  excuse 
for  existence,  and  neither  had  any  hope  of  sur- 
vival. The  city  phrase  is  often  doubtful  in  mean- 
ing and  obscure  in  origin.  In  London,  for  ex- 
ample, the  four-wheel  cab  is  called  a  growler. 
Why  ?  In  New  York  a  can  brought  in  filled  with 
beer  at  a  bar-room  is  called  a  growler,  and  the 
act  of  sending  this  can  from  the  private  house  to 
the  public  house  and  back  is  called  working  the 
growler.  Why  ? 

197 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

But  when  we  find  a  western  writer  describing 
the  effects  of  tanglefoot  whisky,  the  adjective 
explains  itself,  and  is  justified  at  once.  And  we 
discover  immediately  the  daringly  condensed 
metaphor  in  the  sign,  "Don't  monkey  with  the 
"}  the  picturesqueness  of  the  word 
and  its  fitness  for  service  are  visible  at 
a  glance.  So  we  understand  the  phrase  readily 
and  appreciate  its  force  when  we  read  the  story 
of  'Buck  Fanshaw's  Funeral,'  and  are  told  that 
"he  never  went  bach  on  his  mother,"  or  when 
we  hear  the  defender  of  '  Banty  Tim  '  declare  that 

"  Ef  one  of  you  teches  the  boy 
He  '11  wrestle  bis  bash  to-night  in  hell, 
Or  my  name  's  not  Tilman  Joy." 

To  wrestle  one's  hash  is  not  an  elegant  expression, 
one  must  admit,  and  it  is  not  likely  to  be  adopted 
into  the  literary  language  ;  but  it  is  forcible  at 
least,  and  not  stupid.  To  go  back  on,  however, 
bids  fair  to  take  its  place  in  our  speech  as  a 
phrase  at  once  useful  and  vigorous. 

From  the  wide  and  wind-swept  plains  of  the 
west  came  bli^ard,  and  altho  it  has  been 
suggested  that  the  word  is  a  survival  from  some 
local  British  dialect,  the  west  still  deserves  the 
credit  of  having  rescued  it  from  desuetude.  From 
the  logging-camps  of  the  northwest  came  boom, 
an  old  word  again,  but  with  a  new  meaning 
198 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

which  the  language  promptly  accepted.  From 
still  farther  west  came  the  use  of  sand  to  indicate 
staying  power,  backbone  —  what  New  England 
knows  as  grit  and  old  England  as  pluck  (a  far 
less  expressive  word).  From  the  southwest  came 
cine}),  from  the  tightening  of  the  girths  of  the 
pack-mules,  and  so  by  extension  indicating  a 
grasp  of  anything  so  firm  that  it  cannot  get  away. 
Just  why  a  dead  cinch  should  be  the  securest 
of  any,  I  confess  I  do  not  know.  Dead  is  here 
used  as  an  intensive;  and  the  study  of  intensives 
is  as  yet  in  its  infancy.  In  all  parts  of  Great 
Britain  and  the  United  States  we  find  certain 
words  wrenched  from  their  true  meaning  and 
most  arbitrarily  employed  to  heighten  the  value 
of  other  words.  Thus  we  have  a  dead  cinch,  or 
a  dead  sure  thing,  a  dead  shot,  a  dead  level  —  and 
for  these  last  two  terms  we  can  discover  perhaps  a 
reason.  Lowell  noted  in  New  England  a  use  of 
tormented  as  a  euphemism  for  damned,  as  "  not 
a  tormented  cent."  Every  American  traveler  in 
England  must  have  remarked  with  surprise  the 
British  use  of  the  Saxon  synonym  of  sanguinary 
as  an  intensive,  the  chief  British  rivals  of  bloody 
in  this  respect  being  blooming  and  blasted.  All 
three  are  held  to  be  shocking  to  polite  ears,  and 
it  was  with  bated  breath  that  the  editor  of  a  Lon- 
don newspaper  wrote  about  the  prospects  of  "  a 

b y  war";  while,  as  another  London  editor 

'99 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

declared  recently,  it  is  now  impossible  for  a  cock- 
ney to  read  with  proper  sympathy  Jeffrey's  ap- 
peal to  Carlyle,  after  a  visit  to  Craigenputtock,  to 
bring  his  "  blooming  Eve  out  of  her  blasted  para- 
dise." Of  the  other  slang  synonyms  for  very — 
jolly,  "he  was  Jolly  ill,"  is  British;  awfully  was 
British  first,  and  is  now  American  also ;  and  daisy 
is  American.  But  any  discussion  of  intensives  is 
a  digression  here,  and  I  return  as  soon  as  may  be 
to  the  main  road. 

To  freeze  to  anything  or  any  person  is  a 
down-east  phrase,  so  Lowell  records,  but  it  has 
a  far-western  strength;  and  so  has  to  get  solid 
with,  as  when  the  advice  is  given  that  "if  a  man 
is  courting  a  girl  it  is  best  to  get  solid  with  her 
father."  What  is  this  phrase,  however,  but  the 
French  solidarite,  which  we  have  recently  taken 
over  into  English  to  indicate  a  communion  of  in- 
terests and  responsibilities  ?  The  likeness  of 
French  terms  to  American  is  no  new  thing; 
Lowell  told  us  that  Horace  Mann,  in  one  of  his 
public  addresses,  commented  at  some  length  on 
the  beauty  and  moral  significance  of  the  French 
phrase  s'orienter,  and  called  upon  his  young 
friends  to  practise  it,  altho  "there  was  not  a 
Yankee  in  his  audience  whose  problem  had  not 
always  been  to  find  out  what  was  about  east,  and 
to  shape  his  course  accordingly."  A  few  years 
ago,  in  turning  over  'Karikari,'  a  volume  of  M. 
200 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

Ludovic  Halevy's  clever  and  charming  sketches 
of  Parisian  character,  I  met  with  a  delightful 
young  lady  who  had  pas  pour  deux  Hards  de 
coquetterie ;  and  I  wondered  whether  M.  Halevy, 
if  he  were  an  American,  and  one  of  the  forty  of 
an  American  Academy,  would  venture  the  asser- 
tion that  his  heroine  was  not  coquettish  for  a 
cent. 

Closely  akin  to  to  freeze  to  and  to  be  solid  with  is 
jumped  on.  When  severe  reproof  is  administered 
the  culprit  is  said  to  be  jumped  on;  and  if  the 
reproof  shall  be  unduly  severe,  the  sufferer  is  said 
then  to  be  jumped  on  "with  both  feet.  All  three 
of  these  phrases  belong  to  a  class  from  which 
the  literary  language  has  enlisted  many  worthy 
recruits  in  the  past,  and  it  would  not  surprise  me 
to  see  them  answer  to  their  names  whenever  a 
new  dictionary  calls  the  roll  of  English  words. 
Will  they  find  themselves  shoulder  to  shoulder 
with  spook,  a  word  of  Dutch  origin,  now  volun- 
teering for  English  service  both  in  New  York 
and  in  South  Africa  ?  And  by  that  time  will 
slump  have  been  admitted  to  the  ranks,  and  fad, 
and  crank,  in  the  secondary  meaning  of  a  man  of 
somewhat  unsettled  mind  ?  Slump  is  an  Ameri- 
canism, crank  is  an  Americanism  of  remote  British 
descent,  and  fad  is  a  Briticism ;  this  last  is  perhaps 
the  most  needed  word  of  the  three,  and  from  it 
we  get  a  name  for  the  faddist,  the  bore  who 

201 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

rides  his  hobby  hard  and  without  regard  to  the 
hounds. 

Just  as  in  New  York  the  "Upper  Ten  Thou- 
sand "  of  N.  P.  Willis  have  shrunk  to  the  "  Four 
Hundred  "  of  Mr.  Ward  McAllister,  so  in  London 
the  swells  soon  became  the  smart  set,  and  after 
a  while  developed  into  swagger  people,  as  they 
became  more  and  more  exclusive  and  felt  the 
need  of  new  terms  to  express  their  new  quality. 
But  in  no  department  of  speech  is  the  consump- 
tion of  words  more  rapid  than  in  that  describing 
the  degrees  of  intoxication ;  and  the  list  of  slang 
synonyms  for  the  drunkard,  and  for  his  condi- 
tion, and  for  the  act  which  brings  it  about,  is  as 
long  as  Leporello's.  Among  these,  to  get  loaded 
and  to  carry  a  load  are  expressions  obvious 
enough ;  and  when  we  recall  that  jag  is  a  pro- 
vincialism meaning  a  light  load,  we  see  easily 
that  the  man  who  has  a  jag  on  is  in  the  earlier 
stages  of  intoxication.  This  use  of  the  word  is, 
I  think,  wholly  American,  and  it  has  not  crossed 
the  Atlantic  as  yet,  or  else  a  British  writer  could 
never  have  blundered  into  a  definition  of  Jag  as 
an  umbrella,  quoting  in  illustration  a  paragraph 
from  a  St.  Louis  paper  which  said  that  "Mr. 
Brown  was  seen  on  the  street  last  Sunday  in  the 
rain  carrying  a  large  fine  jag."  One  may  won- 
der what  this  British  writer  would  have  made 
out  of  the  remark  of  the  Chicago  humorist,  that  a 

202 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

certain  man  was  not  always  drunk,  even  if  he  did 
jump  "from  jag  to  jag  like  an  alcoholic  chamois." 

Here,  of  course,  we  are  fairly  within  the  boun- 
daries of  slang —  of  the  slang  which  is  temporary 
only,  and  which  withers  away  swiftly.  But  is 
swell  slang  now,  and  fad,  and  crank  ?  Is  boom 
slang,  and  is  blt^ard  ?  And  if  it  is  difficult  to 
draw  any  line  of  division  between  mere  slang  on 
the  one  side,  and  idiomatic  words  and  phrases  on 
the  other,  it  is  doubly  difficult  to  draw  this  line 
between  mere  slang  and  the  legitimate  technicali- 
ties of  a  calling  or  a  craft.  Is  it  slang  to  say  of  a 
picture  that  the  chief  figure  in  it  is  out  of  drawing, 
or  that  the  painter  has  got  his  values  wrong  ? 
And  how  could  any  historian  explain  the  ins  and 
outs  of  New  York  politics  who  could  not  state 
frankly  that  the  machine  made  a  slate,  and  that 
the  mugwumps  broke  it.  Such  a  historian  must 
needs  master  the  meaning  of  laying  pipe  for 
a  nomination,  or  pulling  wires  to  secure  it,  of 
taking  the  stump  before  election,  and  of  log-rolling 
after  it;  he  must  apprehend  the  exact  relation  of 
the  boss  to  his  henchmen  and  his  heelers;  and  he 
must  understand  who  the  half-breeds  were,  and 
the  stalwarts,  and  how  the  swallowtails  were 
different  from  the  short-hairs. 

To  call  one  man  a  boss  and  another  a  henchman 
may  have  been  slang  once,  but  the  words  are 
lawful  now,  because  they  are  necessary.  It  is 
203 


THE  FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

only  by  these  words  that  the  exact  relation  of  a 
certain  kind  of  political  leader  to  a  certain  kind 
of  political  follower  can  be  expressed  succinctly. 
There  are,  of  course,  not  a  few  political  phrases 
still  under  the  ban  because  they  are  needless. 
Some  of  these  may  some  day  come  to  convey  an 
exact  shade  of  meaning  not  expressed  by  any 
other  word,  and  when  this  shall  happen,  they 
will  take  their  places  in  the  legitimate  vocabulary. 
I  doubt  whether  this  good  fortune  will  ever  befall 
a  use  of  influence,  now  not  uncommon  in  Wash- 
ington. The  statesman  at  whose  suggestion  and 
request  an  office-holder  has  received  his  appoint- 
ment is  known  as  that  office-holder's  influence. 
Thus  a  poor  widow,  suddenly  turned  out  of  a 
post  she  had  held  for  years,  because  it  was 
wanted  by  the  henchman  of  some  boss  whose 
good  will  a  senator  or  a  department  chief  wished 
to  retain,  explained  to  a  friend  that  her  dismissal 
was  due  to  the  fact  that  her  influence  had  died 
during  the  summer.  The  inevitable  extension  of 
the  merit  system  in  the  civil  service  of  our  coun- 
try will  probably  prevent  the  permanent  accept- 
ance of  this  new  meaning. 

The  political  is  only  one  of  a  vast  number  of 
technical  vocabularies,  all  of  which  are  proffering 
their  words  for  popular  consumption.  Every  art 
and  every  science,  every  trade  and  every  calling, 
every  sect  and  every  sport,  has  its  own  special 
204 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

lexicon,  the  most  of  the  words  in  which  must 
always  remain  outside  of  the  general  speech 
of  the  whole  people.  They  are  reserves,  to  be 
drawn  upon  to  fill  up  the  regular  army  in  time 
of  need.  Legitimate  enough  when  confined  to 
their  proper  use,  those  technicalities  become 
slang  when  employed  out  of  season,  and  when 
applied  out  of  the  special  department  of  human 
endeavor  in  which  they  have  been  evolved.  Of 
course,  if  the  public  interest  in  this  department 
is  increased  for  any  reason,  more  and  more  words 
from  that  technical  vocabulary  are  adopted  into 
the  wider  dictionary  of  popular  speech;  and  thus 
the  general  language  is  still  enriching  itself  by 
the  taking  over  of  words  and  phrases  from  the 
terminology  devised  by  experts  for  their  own 
use.  Not  without  interest  would  it  be  if  we 
could  ascertain  exactly  how  much  of  the  special 
vocabulary  of  the  mere  man  of  letters  is  now 
understandable  by  the  plain  people.  It  is  one  of 
the  characters  in  '  Middlemarch  '  who  maintains 
that  "correct  English"  is  only  "the  slang  of 
prigs  who  write  history  and  essays,  and  the 
strongest  slang  of  all  is  the  slang  of  poets." 

Of  recent  years  many  of  the  locutions  of  the 
Stock  Exchange  have  won  their  way  into  general 
knowledge;  and  there  are  few  of  us  who  do  not 
know  what  bears  and  bulls  are,  what  a  corner  is, 
and  what  is  a  margin.  The  practical  application 
205 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

of  scientific  knowledge  makes  the  public  at  large 
familiar  with  many  principles  hitherto  the  exclu- 
sive possession  of  the  experts,  and  the  public  at 
large  gets  to  use  freely  to-day  technicalities  which 
even  the  learned  of  yesterday  would  not  have 
understood.  Current,  for  example,  and  insula- 
tion, made  familiar  by  the  startlingly  rapid  exten- 
sion of  electrical  possibilities  in  the  last  few  years, 
have  been  so  fully  assimilated  that  they  are  now 
used  independently  and  without  avowed  refer- 
ence to  their  original  electrical  meanings. 

The  prevalence  of  a  sport  or  of  a  game  brings 
into  general  use  the  terms  of  that  special  amuse- 
ment. The  Elizabethan  dramatists,  for  example, 
use  vy  and  revy  and  the  other  technicalities  of  the 
game  of  primero  as  freely  as  our  western  humorists 
use  going  it  blind  and  calling  and  the  other  tech- 
nicalities of  the  game  of  poker,  which  has  been 
evolved  out  of  primero  in  the  course  of  the  cen- 
turies. Some  of  the  technicalities  of  euchre 
also,  and  of  whist,  have  passed  into  every-day 
speech;  and  so  have  many  of  the  terms  of  base- 
ball and  of  football,  of  racing  and  of  trotting, 
of  rowing  and  of  yachting.  These  made  their 
way  into  the  vocabulary  of  the  average  man  one 
by  one,  as  the  seasons  went  around  and  as  the 
sports  followed  one  another  in  popularity.  So 
during  the  civil  war  many  military  phrases  were 
frequent  in  the  mouths  of  the  people;  and  some 
206 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

of  these  established  themselves  firmly  in  the 
vocabulary. 

"In  language,  as  in  life, "so  Professor  Dowden 
tells  us,  "there  is,  so  to  speak,  an  aristocracy 
and  a  commonalty :  words  with  a  heritage  of  dig- 
nity, words  which  have  been  ennobled,  and  a 
rabble  of  words  which  are  excluded  from  posi- 
tions of  honor  and  trust."  Some  writers  and 
speakers  there  are  with  so  delicate  a  sense  of 
refinement  that  they  are  at  ease  only  with  the 
ennobled  words,  with  the  words  that  came 
over  with  the  conquerer,  with  the  lords,  spir- 
itual and  temporal,  of  the  vocabulary.  Others 
there  are,  parvenus  themselves,  and  so  tainted 
with  snobbery  that  they  are  happy  only  in  the 
society  of  their  betters;  and  these  express  the 
utmost  contempt  for  the  mass  of  the  vulgar. 
Yet  again  others  there  are  who  have  Lincoln's 
liking  for  the  plain  words  of  the  plain  people 
—  the  democrats  of  the  dictionary,  homely, 
simple,  direct.  These  last  are  tolerant  of  the 
words,  once  of  high  estate,  which  have  lost  their 
rank  and  are  fallen  upon  evil  days,  preferring 
them  over  the  other  words,  plebeian  once,  but 
having  pushed  their  fortunes  energetically  in 
successive  generations,  until  now  there  are  none 
more  highly  placed. 

Perhaps  the  aristocratic  figure  of  speech  is 
a  little  misleading,  because  in  the  English  lan- 
207 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

guage,  as  in  France  after  the  Revolution,  we  find 
la  carriere  owverte  aux  talents,  and  every  word 
has  a  fair  chance  to  attain  the  highest  dignity  in 
the  gift  of  the  dictionary.  No  doubt  family  con- 
nections are  still  potent,  and  it  is  much  easier  for 
some  words  to  rise  in  life  than  it  is  for  others. 
Most  people  would  hold  that  war  and  law  and 
medicine  made  a  more  honorable  pedigree  for  a 
technical  term  than  the  stage,  for  example,  or  than 
some  sport. 

And  yet  the  stage  has  its  own  enormous  vocab- 
ulary, used  with  the  utmost  scientific  precision. 
The  theater  is  a  hotbed  of  temporary  slang,  often 
as  lawless,  as  vigorous,  and  as  picturesque  as  the 
phrases  of  the  west;  but  it  has  also  a  terminology 
of  its  own,  containing  some  hundreds  of  words, 
used  always  with  absolute  exactness.  A  mascot, 
meaning  one  who  brings  good  luck,  and  a  hoo- 
doo, meaning  one  who  brings  ill  fortune,  are  terms 
invented  in  the  theater,  it  is  true;  and  many  an- 
other odd  word  can  be  credited  to  the  same 
source.  But  every  one  behind  the  scenes  knows 
also  what  sky-borders  are,  and  bunch-lights, 
and  vampire-traps,  and  raking-pieces  —  technical 
terms  all  of  them,  and  all  used  with  rigorous  ex- 
actitude. Like  the  technicalities  of  any  other 
profession,  those  of  the  stage  are  often  very  puz- 
zling to  the  uninitiated,  and  a  greenhorn  could 
hardly  even  make  a  guess  at  the  meaning  of 
208 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

terms  which  every  visitor  to  a  green-room  might 
use  at  any  moment.  What  layman  could  explain 
the  office  of  a.  cut-drop,  the  utility  of  a  carpenter's 
scene,  or  the  precise  privileges  of  a  bill-board 
ticket  ? 

There  is  one  word  which  the  larger  vocabulary 
of  the  public  has  lately  taken  from  the  smaller 
vocabulary  of  the  playhouse,  and  which  some 
strolling  player  of  the  past  apparently  borrowed 
from  some  other  vagabond  familiar  with  thieves' 
slang.  This  word  is  fake.  It  has  always  con- 
veyed the  suggestion  of  an  intent  to  deceive. 
"  Are  you  going  to  get  up  new  scenery  for  the 
new  play?"  might  be  asked;  and  the  answer 
would  be,  "No;  we  shall  fake  it,"  meaning 
thereby  that  old  scenery  would  be  retouched  and 
readjusted  so  as  to  have  the  appearance  of  new. 
From  the  stage  the  word  passed  to  the  news- 
papers, and  a  fake  is  a  story  invented,  not 
founded  on  fact,  "made  out  of  whole  cloth," 
as  the  stump-speakers  say.  Mr.  Howells,  always 
bold  in  using  new  words,  accepts  fake  as  good 
enough  for  him,  and  prints  it  in  the  '  Quality  of 
Mercy  '  without  the  stigma  of  italics  or  quotation- 
marks;  just  as  in  the  same  story  he  has  adopted 
the  colloquial  electrics  for  electric  lights— i.e., 
"  He  turned  off  the  electrics." 

And  hereafter  the  rest  of  us  may  use  either  fake 
or  electrics  with  a  clear  conscience,  either  hiding 
209 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

ourselves  behind  Mr.  Howells,  who  can  always 
give  a  good  account  of  himself  when  attacked, 
or  else  coming  out  into  the  open  and  asserting 
our  own  right  to  adopt  either  word  because  it 
is  useful.  "Is  it  called  for ?  Is  it  accordant  with 
the  analysis  of  the  language?  Is  it  offered  or 
backed  by  good  authority  ?  These  are  the  con- 
siderations by  which  general  consent  is  won  or 
repelled,"  so  Professor  Whitney  tells  us,  "and 
general  consent  decides  every  case  without  ap- 
peal." It  happens  that  Don  Quixote  preceded 
Professor  Whitney  in  this  exposition  of  the  law, 
for  when  he  was  instructing  Sancho  Panza,  then 
about  to  be  appointed  governor  of  an  island,  he 
used  a  Latinized  form  of  a  certain  word  which 
had  become  vulgar,  explaining  that  "if  some  do 
not  understand  these  terms  it  matters  little,  for 
custom  will  bring  them  into  use  in  the  course  of 
time  so  that  they  will  be  readily  understood. 
That  is  the  way  a  language  is  enriched;  custom 
and  the  public  are  all-powerful  there."  Some- 
times the  needful  word  which  is  thought  to  be 
too  common  for  use  is  Latinized,  as  Don  Quixote 
preferred,  but  more  often  it  is  ennobled  without 
change,  being  simply  lifted  out  from  among  its 
former  low  companions. 

One  of  the  hardest  lessons  for  the  amateurs  in 
linguistics  to  learn  —  and  most  of  them  never 
attain  to  this  wisdom  —  is  that  affectations  are 


THE  FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

fleeting,  that  vulgarisms  die  of  their  own  weak- 
ness, and  that  corruptions  do  little  harm  to  the 
language.  And  the  reason  is  not  far  to  seek: 
either  the  apparent  affectation,  the  alleged  vul- 
garism, the  so-called  corruption,  is  accidental 
and  useless,  in  which  case  its  vogue  will  be 
brief  and  it  will  sink  swiftly  into  oblivion;  or 
else  it  represents  a  need  and  fills  a  want,  in  which 
case,  no  matter  how  careless  it  may  be  or  how 
inaccurately  formed,  it  will  hold  its  own  firmly, 
and  there  is  really  nothing  more  to  be  said  about 
it.  In  other  words,  slang  and  all  other  variations 
from  the  high  standard  of  the  literary  language 
are  either  temporary  or  permanent.  If  they  are 
temporary  only,  the  damage  they  can  do  is  in- 
considerable. If  they  are  permanent,  their  sur- 
vival is  due  solely  to  the  fact  that  they  were 
convenient  or  necessary.  When  a  word  or  a 
phrase  has  come  to  stay  (as  reliable  has,  appa- 
rently), it  is  idle  to  denounce  a  decision  rendered 
by  the  court  of  last  resort.  The  most  that  we 
can  do  with  advantage  is  to  refrain  from  using  the 
word  ourselves,  if  we  so  prefer. 

It  is  possible  to  go  further,  even,  and  to  turn 
the  tables  on  those  who  see  in  slang  an  ever- 
growing evil.  Not  only  is  there  little  danger  to 
the  language  to  be  feared  from  those  alleged  cor- 
ruptions, and  from  these  doubtful  locutions  of 
evanescent  popularity,  but  real  harm  is  done  by 

211 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

the  purists  themselves,  who  do  not  understand 
every  modification  of  our  language,  and  who 
seek  to  check  the  development  of  idiom  and  to 
limit  the  liberty  which  enables  our  speech  freely 
to  provide  for  its  own  needs  as  these  are  revealed 
by  time.  It  is  these  half-educated  censors, 
prompt  to  protest  against  whatever  is  novel  to 
them,  and  swift  to  set  up  the  standard  of  a  nar- 
row personal  experience,  who  try  to  curb  the 
development  of  a  language.  It  cannot  be  de- 
clared too  often  and  too  emphatically  how  fortu- 
nate it  is  that  the  care  of  our  language  and  the 
control  of  its  development  is  not  in  the  hands 
even  of  the  most  competent  scholars.  In  lan- 
guage, as  in  politics,  the  people  at  large  are  in 
the  long  run  better  judges  of  their  own  needs 
than  any  specialist  can  be.  As  Professor  Whitney 
says,  "the  language  would  soon  be  shorn  of  no 
small  part  of  its  strength  if  placed  exclusively  in 
the  hands  of  any  individual  or  of  any  class."  In 
the  hands  of  no  class  would  it  be  enfeebled  sooner 
than  if  it  were  given  to  the  guardianship  of  the 
pedants  and  the  pedagogs. 

A  sloven  in  speech  is  as  offensive  as  a  sloven 
in  manners  or  in  dress;  and  neatness  of  phrase 
is  as  pleasant  to  the  ear  as  neatness  of  attire  to 
the  eye.  A  man  should  choose  his  words  at 
least  as  carefully  as  he  chooses  his  clothes;  a 
hint  of  the  dandy  even  is  unobjectionable,  if  it 

212 


THE   FUNCTION   OF  SLANG 

is  but  a  hint.  But  when  a  man  gives  his  whole 
mind  to  his  dress,  it  is  generally  because  he  has 
but  little  mind  to  give;  and  so  when  a  man  spends 
his  force  wholly  in  rejecting  words  and  phrases, 
it  is  generally  because  he  lacks  ideas  to  express 
with  the  words  and  phrases  of  which  he  does 
approve.  In  most  cases  a  man  can  say  best 
what  he  has  to  say  without  lapsing  into  slang; 
but  then  a  slangy  expression  which  actually  tells 
us  something  is  better  than  the  immaculate  sen- 
tence empty  of  everything  but  the  consciousness 
of  its  own  propriety. 
(•893) 


213 


IX 
QUESTIONS  OF  USAGE 


QUESTIONS  OF  USAGE 

IF  any  proof  were  needed  of  the  fact  that  an 
immense  number  of  people  take  an  intense 
interest  in  the  right  and  wrong  use  of  the  English 
language,  and  also  of  the  further  fact  that  their 
interest  is  out  of  all  proportion  to  their  knowledge 
of  the  history  of  our  speech,  such  proof  could  be 
found  in  the  swift  and  unceasing  eruption  of 
"Jetters  to  the  editor"  which  broke  out  in  many 
of  the  American  newspapers  immediately  after 
the  publication  of  Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling's  '  Reces- 
sional.' The  exciting  cause  of  this  rash  exhibi- 
tion was  found  in  the  line  which  told  us  that 

The  shouting  and  the  tumult  dies. 

The  gross  blunder  in  this  sentence  leaped  to  the 
eyes  of  many  whose  acquaintance  with  the  prin- 
ciples of  English  construction  was  confined  to 
what  they  chanced  to  remember  of  the  rules 
learned  by  heart  in  their  grammar-school  days. 
But  there  were  others  whose  reading  was  a  little 
wider,  and  who  were  able  to  cite  precedents  in 
217 


QUESTIONS  OF  USAGE 

Mr.  Kipling's  favor  from  Milton  and  from  Shak- 
spere  and  from  the  King  James  translation  of  the 
Bible.  Yet  the  argument  from  the  past  failed  to 
convince  some  of  the  original  protestants,  one  of 
whom  suggested  that  the  erring  poet  should  be 
sent  to  a  night-school,  while  another  objected  to 
any  further  discussion  of  the  subject,  since  "a 
person  who  does  n't  know  that  the  plural  form 
of  the  verb  is  used  when  the  subject  of  said  verb 
is  two  or  more  nouns  in  the  singular  number 
should  receive  no  mention  in  a  reputable  news- 
paper." It  may  be  doubted  whether  the  alter- 
cation was  really  bloody  enough  to  demand 
attention  from  the  disreputable  newspapers, 
altho  it  was  fierce  and  intolerant  while  it 
lasted. 

The  battle  raged  for  a  fortnight,  and  the  foun- 
dations of  the  deep  were  broken  up.  Yet  it  was 
really  a  tempest  in  a  teapot,  and  oil  for  the 
troubled  waters  was  ready  at  hand  had  any  of 
those  in  danger  of  shipwreck  thought  to  make 
use  of  it.  In  Professor  Lounsbury's  '  History  of 
the  English  Language'— a  book  from  which  it  is 
a  constant  pleasure  to  quote,  since  it  combines 
sound  scholarship,  literary  skill,  and  common 
sense  in  an  uncommon  degree— we  are  told  that 
"  rules  have  been  and  still  are  laid  down  .  .  . 
which  never  had  any  existence  outside  of  the 
minds  of  grammarians  and  verbal  critics.  By 
.  218 


QUESTIONS  OF  USAGE 

these  rules,  so  far  as  they  are  observed,  freedom 
of  expression  is  cramped,  idiomatic  peculiarity 
destroyed,  and  false  tests  for  correctness  set  up, 
which  give  the  ignorant  opportunity  to  point  out 
supposed  error  in  others,  while  the  real  error  lies 
in  their  own  imperfect  acquaintance  with  the  best 
usage." 

And  then  Professor  Lounsbury  cites  in  illustra- 
tion the  rule  which  was  brought  up  against  Mr. 
Kipling:  "There  is  a  rule  of  Latin  syntax  that 
two  or  more  substantives  joined  by  a  copulative 
require  the  verb  to  be  in  the  plural.  This  has 
been  foisted  into  the  grammar  of  English,  of 
which  it  is  no  more  true  than  it  is  of  modern 
German.  .  .  .  The  grammar  of  English,  as  ex- 
hibited in  the  utterances  of  its  best  writers  and 
speakers,  has  from  the  very  earliest  period  al- 
lowed the  widest  discretion  as  to  the  use  either 
of  the  singular  or  the  plural  in  such  cases.  The 
importation  and  imposition  of  rules  foreign  to  its 
idiom,  like  the  one  just  mentioned,  does  more  to 
hinder  the  free  development  of  the  tongue,  and 
to  dwarf  its  freedom  of  expression,  than  the 
widest  prevalence  of  slovenliness  of  speech,  or 
of  affectation  of  style ;  for  these  latter  are  always 
temporary  in  their  character,  and  are  sure  to  be 
left  behind  by  the  advance  in  popular  cultivation, 
or  forgotten  through  the  change  in  popular  taste." 

This  is  really  a  declaration  of  independence  for 
219 


QUESTIONS  OF  USAGE 

writers  of  English.  It  is  the  frank  assertion  that 
a  language  is  made  by  those  who  use  it— made 
by  that  very  use.  Language  is  not  an  invention 
of  the  grammarians  and  of  the  word-critics, 
whose  business,  indeed,  is  not  to  make  language 
or  to  prescribe  rules,  but  more  modestly  to  record 
usage  and  to  discover  the  principles  which  may 
underlie  the  incessant  development  of  our  com- 
mon speech.  And  here  in  discussing  the  syntax 
Professor  Lounsbury  is  at  one  with  Mr.  George 
Meredith  discussing  the  vocabulary  of  our  lan- 
guage, when  the  British  novelist  notes  his  own 
liking  for  "  our  blunt  and  racy  vernacular,  which 
a  society  nourished  upon  Norman  English  and 
English  Latin  banishes  from  print,  largely  to  its 
impoverishment,  some  think." 

Those  who  have  tried  to  impose  a  Latin  syntax 
on  the  English  language  are  as  arbitrary  as  those 
who  have  insisted  on  an  English  pronunciation 
of  the  Latin  language.  Their  attitude  is  as  illogi- 
cal as  it  is  dogmatic;  and  nowhere  is  dogmatism 
less  welcome  than  in  the  attempt  to  come  to  a  just 
conclusion  in  regard  to  English  usage;  and  no- 
where is  the  personal  equation  more  carefully  to  be 
allowed  for.  A  term  is  not  necessarily  acceptable 
because  we  ourselves  are  accustomed  to  it,  nor  is 
it  necessarily  to  be  rejected  because  it  reaches  us 
as  a  novelty.  The  Americanism  which  a  Brit- 
ish journalist  glibly  denounces  may  be  but  the 


QUESTIONS   OF   USAGE 

ephemeral  catchword  of  a  single  street-gang,  or 
it  may  have  come  over  in  the  'Mayflower'  and 
be  able  to  trace  its  ancestry  back  to  a  forefather 
that  crossed  with  William  the  Conqueror.  The 
Briticism  which  strikes  some  of  us  as  uncouth 
and  vulgar  may  be  but  a  chance  bit  of  cockney 
slang,  or  it  may  be  warranted  by  the  very  genius 
of  our  language. 

Most  of  the  little  manuals  which  pretend  to 
regulate  our  use  of  our  own  language  and  to 
declare  what  is  and  what  is  not  good  English  are 
grotesque  in  their  ignorance;  and  the  best  of  them 
are  of  small  value,  because  they  are  prepared  on 
the  assumption  that  the  English  language  is  dead, 
like  the  Latin,  and  that,  like  Latin  again,  its  usage 
is  fixed  finally.  Of  course  this  assumption  is  as 
far  as  possible  from  the  fact.  The  English  lan- 
guage is  alive  now— very  much  alive.  And  be- 
cause it  is  alive  it  is  in  a  constant  state  of  growth. 
It  is  developing  daily  according  to  its  needs.  It 
is  casting  aside  words  and  usages  that  are  no 
longer  satisfactory;  it  is  adding  new  terms  as 
new  things  are  brought  forward ;  and  it  is  making 
new  usages,  as  convenience  suggests,  short-cuts 
across  lots,  and  to  the  neglect  of  the  five-barred 
gates  rigidly  set  up  by  our  ancestors.  It  is  throw- 
ing away  as  worn  out  words  which  were  once 
very  fashionable;  and  it  is  giving  up  grammatical 
forms  which  seem  to  be  no  longer  useful.  It  is 


QUESTIONS   OF   USAGE 

continually  trying  to  keep  itself  in  the  highest 
state  of  efficiency  for  work  it  has  to  do.  It  is 
ever  urging  ahead  in  the  direction  of  increased 
utility;  and  if  any  of  the  so-called  "rules"  hap- 
pens to  stand  in  the  path  of  its  progress— so 
much  the  worse  for  the  rule!  As  Stephenson 
said,  "  It  will  be  bad  for  the  coo!" 

The  English  language  is  the  tool  of  the  peoples 
who  speak  English  and  who  have  made  it  to  fit 
their  hands.  They  have  fashioned  it  to  suit  their 
own  needs,  and  it  is  quite  as  characteristic  as  any- 
thing else  these  same  peoples  have  made— quite 
as  characteristic  as  the  common  law  and  as  par- 
liamentary government.  A  language  cannot  but 
be  a  most  important  witness  when  we  wish  to 
inquire  into  the  special  peculiarities  of  a  race. 
The  French,  for  instance,  are  dominated  by  the 
social  instinct,  and  they  are  prone  to  rely  on  logic 
a  little  too  much,  and  their  language  is  therefore 
a  marvel  of  transparency  and  precision.  In  like 
manner  we  might  deduce  from  an  analysis  of 
the  German  language  an  opinion  as  to  the  slow- 
ness of  the  individual  Teuton,  as  to  his  occasional 
cloudiness,  as  to  his  willingness  to  take  trouble, 
and  as  to  his  ultimate  thoroughness. 

The  peoples  who  speak  English  are  very  prac- 
tical and  very  direct;  they  are  impatient  of  need- 
less detail;  and  they  are  intolerant  of  mere  theory. 
These  are  some  of  the  reasons  why  English  is 

222 


QUESTIONS  OF   USAGE 

less  embarrassed  with  niceties  of  inflection  than 
other  languages,  why  it  has  cut  its  syntax  to  the 
bone,  why  it  has  got  rid  of  most  of  its  declen- 
sions and  conjugations— why,  in  short,  it  has 
almost  justified  the  critic  who  called  it  a  gram- 
marless  tongue.  In  every  language  there  is  a 
constant  tendency  toward  uniformity  and  an  un- 
ceasing effort  to  get  rid  of  abnormal  exceptions 
to  the  general  rule;  but  in  no  language  are  these 
endeavors  more  effective  than  in  English.  In  the 
past  they  have  succeeded  in  simplifying  the  rules 
of  our  speech;  and  they  are  at  work  now  in  the 
present  on  the  same  task  of  making  English  a 
more  efficient  instrument  for  those  who  use  it. 

This  effort  of  the  language  to  do  its  duty  as 
best  it  can  is  partly  conscious  and  partly  uncon- 
scious; and  where  the  word-critic  can  be  of 
service  is  in  watching  for  the  result  of  the  un- 
conscious endeavor,  so  that  it  can  be  made  plain, 
and  so  that  it  can  be  aided  thereafter  by  conscious 
endeavor.  The  tendency  toward  uniformity  is 
irresistible;  and  one  of  its  results  just  now  to  be 
observed  is  an  impending  disappearance  of  the 
subjunctive  mood.  Those  who  may  have  sup- 
posed that  the  subjunctive  was  as  firmly  estab- 
lished in  English  as  the  indicative  can  discover 
easily  enough  by  paying  a  little  attention  to  their 
own  daily  speech  and  to  the  speech  of  their  edu- 
cated neighbors  that  "if  I  be  not  too  late,"  for 
223 


QUESTIONS  OF   USAGE 

instance,  is  a  form  now  rarely  heard  even  in  cul- 
tivated society. 

And  the  same  tendency  is  to  be  observed  also 
in  the  written  language.  Letters  in  the  London 
Author  in  June  and  July,  1897,  showed  that  in  a 
few  less  than  a  million  words  chosen  from  the 
works  of  recent  authors  of  good  repute  there 
were  only  284  instances  of  the  subjunctive  mood, 
and  that  of  these  all  but  fifteen  were  in  the  verb 
"  to  be. "  This  reveals  to  us  that  the  value  of  this 
variation  of  form  is  no  longer  evident,  not  merely 
to  careless  speakers,  but  even  to  careful  writers; 
and  it  makes  it  probable  that  it  is  only  a  question 
of  time  how  soon  the  subjunctive  shall  be  no 
longer  differentiated  from  the  indicative.  Where 
our  grandfathers  would  have  taken  pains  to  say 
"if  I  were  to  go  away,"  and  "if  I  be  not  misin- 
formed," our  grandchildren  will  unhesitatingly 
write,  "if  I  was  to  go  away,"  and  "if  I  am  not 
misinformed."  And  so  posterity  will  not  need 
to  clog  its  memory  with  any  rule  for  the  employ- 
ment of  the  subjunctive;  and  the  English  lan- 
guage will  have  cleansed  itself  of  a  barnacle. 

It  is  this  same  irresistible  desire  for  the  simplest 
form  and  for  the  shortest  which  is  responsible  for 
the  increasing  tendency  to  say  "  he  don't "  and 
"  she  don't,"  on  the  analogy  of  "  we  don't,"  "  you 
don't,"  and  "they  don't,"  instead  of  the  more 
obviously  grammatical  "he  does  n't"  and  "she 
224 


QUESTIONS  OF  USAGE 

does  n't."  A  brave  attempt  has  been  made  to 
maintain  that  "  he  don't"  is  older  than  "  he  does 
n't,"  and  that  it  has  at  least  the  sanction  of  anti- 
quity. However  this  maybe,  "hedon't"  iscertain 
to  sustain  itself  in  the  future  because  it  calls  for  less 
effort  and  because  any  willingness  to  satisfy  the 
purist  will  seem  less  and  less  worth  while  as  time 
goes  on.  It  is  well  that  the  purist  should  fight 
for  his  own  hand;  but  it  is  well  also  to  know 
that  he  is  fighting  a  losing  battle. 

The  purist  used  to  insist  that  we  should  not 
say  "the  house  is  being  built,"  but  rather  "the 
house  is  building."  So  far  as  one  can  judge  from 
a  survey  of  recent  writing  the  purist  has  aban- 
doned this  combat;  and  nobody  nowadays  hesi- 
tates to  ask,  "  What  is  being  done  ?"  The  purist 
still  objects  to  what  he  calls  the  Retained  Object 
in  such  a  sentence  as  "  he  was  given  a  new  suit 
of  clothes."  Here  again  the  struggle  is  vain,  for 
this  usage  is  very  old;  it  is  well  established  in 
English;  and  whatever  may  be  urged  against  it 
theoretically,  it  has  the  final  advantage  of  con- 
venience. The  purist  also  tells  us  that  we  should 
say  "come  to  see  me"  and  "try  to  do  it,"  and 
not  "come  and  see  me"  and  "try  and  do  it." 
Here  once  more  the  purist  is  setting  up  a  per- 
sonal standard  without  any  warrant.  He  may 
use  whichever  of  these  forms  he  likes  best,  and 
we  on  our  part  have  the  same  permission,  with 
225 


QUESTIONS   OF   USAGE 

a  strong  preference  for  the  older  and  more  idio- 
matic of  them. 

Theory  is  all  very  well,  but  to  be  of  any  value 
it  must  be  founded  on  the  solid  rock  of  fact;  and 
even  when  it  is  so  established  it  has  to  yield  to 
convenience.  This  is  what  the  purist  cannot  be 
induced  to  understand.  He  seems  to  think  that 
the  language  was  made  once  for  all,  and  that  any 
deviation  from  the  theory  acted  on  in  the  past  is 
intolerable  in  the  present.  He  is  often  wholly  at 
sea  in  regard  to  his  theories  and  to  his  facts- 
more  often  than  not ;  but  no  doubt  as  to  his  own 
infallibility  ever  discourages  him.  He  just  knows 
that  he  is  right  and  that  everybody  else  is  wrong; 
and  he  has  no  sense  of  humor  to  save  him  from 
himself.  And  he  makes  up  in  violence  what  he 
lacks  in  wisdom.  He  accepts  himself  as  a  pro- 
phet verbally  inspired,  and  he  holds  that  this 
gives  him  the  right  to  call  down  fire  from  heaven 
on  all  who  do  not  accept  his  message. 

It  was  a  purist  of  this  sort  who  once  wrote  to 
a  little  literary  weekly  in  New  York,  protesting 
against  the  use  of  people  when  persons  would 
seem  to  be  the  better  word,  and  complacently 
declaring  that  "  for  twenty-five  years  or  more  I 
have  kept  my  eye  on  this  little  word  people  and 
I  have  yet  to  find  a  single  American  or  English 
author  who  does  not  misuse  it."  We  are  in- 
stantly reminded  of  the  Irish  juryman  who  said, 
226 


QUESTIONS   OF   USAGE 

"  Eleven  more  obstinate  men  I  never  met  in  the 
whole  course  of  my  life."  In  this  pitiful  condi- 
tion of  affairs  one  cannot  discover  on  what  this 
purist  bases  the  hope  he  expresses  that  "in  the 
course  of  two  or  three  hundred  years  the  correct 
employment  of  it  may  possibly  become  general." 
Rather  may  it  be  hoped  that  in  the  course  of  two 
or  three  hundred  years  a  knowledge  of  the  prin- 
ciples which  govern  English  usage  may  become 
general. 

What  is  called  the  Split  Infinitive  is  also  a  cause 
of  pain  to  the  purist,  who  is  greatly  grieved  when 
he  finds  George  Lewes  in  the  '  Life  of  Goethe ' 
saying  "  to  completely  understand. "  This  insert- 
ing of  an  adverb  between  the  to  and  the  rest 
of  the  verb  strikes  the  word-critic  as  pernicious, 
and  he  denounces  it  instantly  as  a  novelty  to  be 
stamped  out  before  it  permanently  contaminates 
our  speech.  Even  Professor  A.  S.  Hill,  in  his 
'Foundations  of  Rhetoric,'  while  admitting  its 
antiquity,  since  it  has  been  in  use  constantly 
from  the  days  of  Wyclif  to  the  days  of  Herbert 
Spencer,  still  declares  it  to  be  "  a  common  fault " 
not  sanctioned  or  even  condoned  by  good 
authority. 

The  fact  is,  I  think,  that  the  Split  Infinitive  has 

a  most  respectable  pedigree,  and  that  it  is  rather 

the  protest  against  it  which  is  the  novelty  now 

establishing  itself.     The  Split  Infinitive  is  to  be 

227 


QUESTIONS  OF   USAGE 

found  in  the  pages  of  Shakspere,  Massinger,  Sir 
Thomas  Browne,  Defoe,  Burke,  Coleridge,  Byron, 
De  Quincey,  Macaulay,  Matthew  Arnold,  Brown- 
ing, Motley,  Lowell,  and  Holmes.  But  it  is  a  fact 
also,  I  think,  that  since  the  protest  has  been  raised 
there  has  been  a  tendency  among  careful  writers 
to  eschew  the  Split  Infinitive,  or  at  least  to  em- 
ploy it  only  when  there  is  a  gain  in  lucidity  from 
its  use,  as  there  is,  for  example,  in  Professor 
Lounsbury's  "  to  more  than  counterbalance " 
('Studies  in  Chaucer,'  i.  447). 

A  writer  who  has  worked  out  for  himself  a 
theory  of  style,  and  who  has  made  up  his  mind 
as  to  the  principles  he  ought  to  follow  in  writing, 
often  yields  to  protests  the  validity  of  which  he 
refuses  to  admit.  He  gives  the  protestant  the 
benefit  of  the  doubt  and  drops  the  stigmatized 
words  from  his  vocabulary  and  refrains  from  the 
stigmatized  usages,  reserving  always  the  right  to 
avail  himself  of  them  at  a  pinch.  What  such  a 
writer  has  for  his  supreme  object  is  to  convey  his 
thought  into  the  minds  of  his  readers  with  the 
least  friction;  and  he  tries  therefore  to  avoid  all 
awkwardness  of  phrase,  all  incongruous  words, 
all  locutions  likely  to  arouse  resistance,  since  any 
one  of  these  things  will  inevitably  lessen  the 
amount  of  attention  which  this  reader  or  that  will 
then  have  available  for  the  reception  of  the  writer's 
message.  This  is  what  Herbert  Spencer  has  called 
228 


QUESTIONS  OF  USAGE 

the  principle  of  Economy  of  Attention ;  and  a  firm 
grasp  of  this  principle  is  a  condition  precedent  to 
a  clear  understanding  of  literary  art. 

For  a  good  and  sufficient  reason  such  a  writer 
stands  ready  at  any  time  to  break  this  self-im- 
posed rule.  If  a  solecism,  or  a  vulgarism  even, 
will  serve  his  purpose  better  at  a  given  moment 
than  the  more  elegant  word,  he  avails  himself  of 
it,  knowing  what  he  is  doing,  and  risking  the 
smaller  loss  for  the  greater  gain.  M.  Legouve 
tells  us  that  at  a  rehearsal  of  a  play  of  Scribe's 
he  drew  the  author's  attention  to  a  bit  of  bad 
French  at  the  climax  of  one  of  the  acts,  and 
Scribe  gratefully  accepted  the  correct  form  which 
was  suggested.  But  two  or  three  rehearsals  later 
Scribe  went  back  unhesitatingly  to  the  earlier  and 
incorrect  phrase,  which  happened  to  be  swifter, 
more  direct,  and  dramatically  more  expressive 
than  the  academically  accurate  sentence  M.  Le- 
gouve had  supplied.  Shakspere  seems  often  to 
have  been  moved  by  like  motives,  and  to  have 
been  willing  at  any  time  to  sacrifice  strict  gram- 
mar to  stage-effectiveness. 

Two  tendencies  exist  side  by  side  to-day,  and 
are  working  together  for  the  improvement  of  our 
language.  One  is  the  tendency  to  disregard  all 
useless  distinctions  and  to  abolish  all  useless  ex- 
ceptions and  to  achieve  simplicity  and  regularity. 
The  other  is  the  tendency  toward  a  more  delicate 
229 


QUESTIONS  OF   USAGE 

precision  which  shall  help  the  writer  to  present 
his  thought  with  the  utmost  clearness. 

Of  the  first  of  these  abundant  examples  can  be 
cited  phrases  which  the  word-critic  would  de- 
nounce, and  which  are  not  easy  to  defend  on  any 
narrow  ground,  but  which  are  employed  freely 
even  by  conscientious  writers,  well  aware  that  no 
utility  is  served  by  a  pedantic  precision.  So  we 
find  Matthew  Arnold  in  his  lectures  '  On  Trans- 
lating Homer '  speaking  of  "  the  four first,"  where 
the  purist  would  prefer  to  have  said  "theirs/ 
four."  So  we  find  Hawthorne  in  the  '  Blithedale 
Romance'  writing  "fellow,  clown,  or  bumpkin, 
to  either  of  these,"  when  the  purist  would  have 
wished  him  to  say  "  to  any  one  of  these,"  holding 
that  "  either"  can  be  applied  only  when  there  are 
but  two  objects. 

In  like  manner  the  word-critics  object  to  the 
use  of  the  superlative  degree  when  the  compara- 
tive is  all  that  is  needed;  yet  we  find  in  the  King 
James  translation  of  Genesis,  "her  eldest  son, 
Esau,"  and  she  had  but  two  sons.  And  they 
refuse  to  allow  either  a  comparative  or  a  superla- 
tive to  adjectives  which  indicate  completeness; 
yet  we  find  in  Gibbon's  'Decline  and  Fall,'  "its 
success  was  not  more  universal."  They  do  not 
like  to  see  a  writer  say  that  anything  is  "  more 
perfect"  or  "  most  complete,"  holding  that  what 
is  universal  or  perfect  or  complete  "does  not 
230 


QUESTIONS  OF  USAGE 

admit  of  augmentation,"  as  one  of  them  declared 
more  than  a  century  ago  in  the  Gentleman's  Mag- 
a^ine  for  July,  1797.  In  all  these  cases  logic  may 
be  on  the  side  of  the  word-critic.  But  what  of 
it  ?  Obedience  to  logic  would  here  serve  no  use- 
ful purpose,  and  therefore  logic  is  boldly  dis- 
obeyed. However  inexact  these  phrases  may  be, 
they  mislead  no  one  and  they  can  be  understood 
without  hesitation. 

Side  by  side  with  this  tendency  to  take  the 
short-cut  exists  the  other  tendency  to  go  the  long 
way  round  if  by  so  doing  the  writer's  purpose  is 
more  easily  accomplished.  There  is  a  common 
usage  which  is  frequently  objurgated  by  the 
word-critics  and  which  may  fall  into  desuetude, 
not  through  their  attacks,  but  because  of  its  con- 
flict with  this  second  tendency.  This  is  the  in- 
sertion of  an  unnecessary  who  or  which  after  an 
and  or  a  but,  as  in  this  sentence  from  Professor 
Butcher's  admirable  discussion  of  Aristotle's 
'  Theory  of  Poetry ' :  "  Nature  is  an  artist  capable 
indeed  of  mistakes,  but  who  by  slow  advances 
and  through  many  failures  realizes  her  own 
idea."  So  in  Gibbon's  'Decline  and  Fall'  we 
are  told  of  "a  chorus  of  twenty-seven  youths 
and  as  many  virgins,  of  noble  family,  and  whose 
parents  were  both  alive."  This  locution  is  pro- 
per in  French,  but  it  is  denounced  as  improper 
in  English  by  the  purists,  who  would  strike  out 
231 


QUESTIONS  OF  USAGE 

the  but  from  Professor  Butcher's  and  the  and 
from  Gibbon's. 

It  is  a  constant  source  of  amusement  to  those 
interested  in  observing  the  condition  and  the 
development  of  the  language  to  note  the  fre- 
quency with  which  the  phrases  put  under  taboo 
by  the  word-critics  occur  in  the  writings  of  the 
masters  of  English.  In  my  own  recent  reading  I 
have  found  this  despised  construction  in  the  pages 
of  Fielding,  Johnson,  Thackeray,  Matthew  Ar- 
nold, Robert  Louis  Stevenson,  Mr.  John  Morley, 
Mr.  Henry  James,  and  Professor  Jebb  in  Great 
Britain,  and  in  pages  of  Hawthorne,  Lowell, 
Holmes,  and  Mr.  John  Fiske  in  the  United  States. 
What  is  more  significant  perhaps  is  its  discovery 
in  the  works  of  professed  students  of  language 
—Trench,  Isaac  Taylor,  Max  Muller,  and  W.  D. 
Whitney. 

And  yet,  in  spite  of  this  array  of  authorities,  I 
am  inclined  to  believe  that  this  usage  may  per- 
haps disappear  with  the  increasing  attention 
which  the  best  writers  are  now  giving  to  the 
rhythm  and  balance  of  their  sentences.  It  is  not 
that  the  form  is  wrong— that  is  a  matter  not  to 
be  decided  offhand ;  it  is  that  the  form  is  awk- 
ward and  that  it  jars  on  the  feeling  for  symmetry 
—the  feeling  which  leads  us  to  put  a  candlestick 
on  each  side  of  the  clock  on  the  mantelpiece. 
Professor  Whitney  began  one  of  his  sentences 
232 


QUESTIONS   OF   USAGE 

thus:  "Castren,  himself  a  Finn,  and  whose  long 
and  devoted  labors  have  taught  us  more  respect- 
ing them  than  has  been  brought  to  light  by  any 
other  man,  ventures,"  etc.  Would  not  this  sen- 
tence have  been  easier  and  more  elegant  if  Whit- 
ney had  either  struck  out  and  (which  is  not 
needed  at  all)  or  else  inserted  who  was  after 
Castren  ?  In  the  sentence  as  Whitney  wrote  it 
and  whose  makes  me  look  back  for  the  who  which 
my  feeling  for  symmetry  leads  me  to  suppose 
must  have  preceded  it  somewhere,  and  in  this 
vain  search  part  of  my  attention  is  abstracted.  I 
have  been  forced  to  think  of  the  manner  of  his 
remarks  when  my  mind  ought  to  have  given  itself 
so  far  as  might  be  to  the  matter  of  them.  In 
other  words,  the  real  objection  to  this  usage  is 
that  it  is  in  violation  of  the  principle  of  Economy 
of  Attention. 

Another  usage  also  under  fire  from  the  purists 
is  exemplified  in  another  extract  from  Whitney: 
"  It  is,  I  am  convinced,  a  mistake  to  commence 
at  once  upon  a  course  of  detailed  comparative 
philology  with  pupils  who  have  only  enjoyed  the 
ordinary  training  in  the  classical  or  modern  lan- 
guages. "  Obviously  his  meaning  would  be  more 
sharply  defined  if  he  had  put  only  after  instead  of 
before  enjoyed.  So  Froude,  writing  about '  Eng- 
lish Seamen  in  the  Sixteenth  Century,'  says  that 
"  the  fore-and-aft  rig  alone  would  enable  a  vessel 

233 


QUESTIONS  OF  USAGE 

to  tack,  as  it  is  called,  and  this  could  only  be  used 
with  craft  of  moderate  tonnage  " ;  and  here  again 
a  transposition  after  the  verb  would  increase  the 
exactness  of  the  statement. 

The  proposition  of  only  is  really  important  only 
when  the  misplacing  of  it  may  cause  ambiguity; 
and  Professor  F.  N.  Scott  has  shown  how  Web- 
ster, always  careful  in  the  niceties  of  style,  un- 
hesitatingly put  only  out  of  its  proper  place,  if  by 
so  doing  he  could  improve  the  rhythm  of  his 
period,  as  in  this  sentence  from  the  second 
Bunker  Hill  oration:  "It  did  not,  indeed,  put  an 
end  to  the  war;  but,  in  the  then  existing  hostile 
state  of  feeling,  the  difficulties  could  only  be  re- 
ferred to  the  arbitration  of  the  sword."  This  is 
as  it  should  be,  the  small  effect  promptly  sacri- 
ficed for  the  larger.  The  rule— if  rule  it  really  is 
—must  be  broken  unhesitatingly  when  there  is 
greater  gain  than  loss. 

There  is  an  anecdote  in  some  volume  of  French 
theatrical  memoirs  narrating  an  experience  of 
Mademoiselle  Clairon,  the  great  tragic  actress, 
with  a  pupil  of  hers,  a  girl  of  fine  natural  gifts 
for  the  histrionic  art,  but  far  too  frequent  and 
too  exuberant  in  her  gesticulation.  So  when  the 
pupil  was  once  to  appear  before  the  public  in  a 
recitation,  Mademoiselle  Clairon  bound  the  girl's 
arms  to  her  side  by  a  stiff  thread  and  sent  her 
thus  upon  the  stage.  With  the  first  strong  feel- 
234 


QUESTIONS  OF   USAGE 

ing  she  had  to  express  the  pupil  tried  to  raise  her 
arms,  only  to  be  restrained  by  the  thread.  A 
dozen  times  in  the  course  of  her  recitation  she 
was  prevented  from  making  the  gestures  she  de- 
sired, until  at  the  very  end  she  could  stand  it  no 
longer,  and  in  the  climax  of  her  emotion  she 
broke  her  bonds  and  lifted  her  hands  to  her  head. 
When  she  came  off  the  stage  she  went  humbly 
to  where  Mademoiselle  Clairon  was  standing  in 
the  wings  and  apologized  for  having  snapped  the 
thread.  "But  you  did  quite  right!"  said  the 
teacher.  "  That  was  the  time  to  make  the  ges- 
ture—not before!" 

Rules  exist  to  aid  in  composition;  and  by  wise 
men  composition  is  not  undertaken  merely  to 
prove  the  existence  of  the  rules.  Circumstances 
may  alter  even  codes  of  manners;  in  Paris,  for 
instance,  it  is  permissible  to  sop  bread  in  the 
sauce,  a  practice  which  is  bad  form  in  London— 
since  nobody  would  want  any  more  of  a  British 
sauce  than  could  be  avoided.  This  paper,  how- 
ever, has  failed  of  its  purpose  if  it  is  taken  as  a 
plea  for  license.  Rather  is  it  intended  as  an  argu- 
ment for  liberty.  It  has  been  written  as  the  re- 
sult of  a  belief  that  a  frank  protest  is  needed  now 
and  again  against  the  excessive  demands  of  the 
linguistic  dogmatists.  That  what  the  linguis- 
tic dogmatists  write  is  as  widely  read  as  it  seems 
to  be  is  a  sign  of  a  healthy  interest  in  the  speech 
235 


QUESTIONS   OF   USAGE 

which  must  serve  us  all,  scholars  and  school- 
masters and  plain  people.  This  interest  should 
be  aroused  also  to  shake  off  the  shackles  with 
which  pedagogs  and  pedants  seek  to  restrain  not 
only  the  full  growth  of  our  noble  tongue,  but 
even  its  free  use.  As  Renan  pithily  put  it,  every 
time  that  "  grammarians  have  tried  deliberately  to 
reform  a  language,  they  have  succeeded  only  in 
making  it  heavy,  without  expression,  and  often 
less  logical  than  the  humblest  dialect." 

If  English  is  to  be  kept  fit  to  do  the  mighty 
work  it  bids  fair  to  be  called  upon  to  accomplish 
in  the  future,  it  must  be  allowed  to  develop  along 
the  line  of  least  resistance.  It  must  be  encouraged 
to  follow  its  own  bent  and  to  supply  its  own 
needs  and  to  shed  its  worn-out  members.  It 
must  not  be  hampered  by  syntax  taken  from 
Latin  or  by  rules  evolved  out  of  the  inner  con- 
sciousness of  word-critics.  It  must  not  be  too 
squeamish  or  even  too  particular,  since  excessive 
refinement  goes  only  with  muscular  weakness. 
It  must  be  allowed  to  venture  on  solecisms,  on 
neologisms,  on  Americanisms,  on  Briticisms,  on 
Australianisms,  if  need  be,  however  ugly  some 
of  these  may  seem,  for  the  language  uses  itself  up 
fast,  and  has  to  be  replenished  that  it  shall  not 
lose  its  vigor  and  its  ardor. 

To  say  this  is  not  to  say  that  every  one  of  us 
who  uses  English  in  speaking  or  in  writing  should 
236 


QUESTIONS  OF   USAGE 

not  always  choose  his  words  carefully  and  decide 
on  his  forms  judiciously.  Only  by  a  wise  selec- 
tion can  the  language  be  kept  at  its  highest  effi- 
ciency; only  thus  can  its  full  powers  be  revealed 
to  us.  And  if  we  decide  that  we  prefer  to  keep 
to  the  very  letter  of  the  law  as  laid  down  by  the 
grammarians— why,  that  is  our  privilege  and  no 
one  shall  say  us  nay.  But  let  us  not  think  scorn 
of  those  who  are  careless  in  paying  their  tithes 
of  mint  and  anise  and  cummin,  if  also  they  stand 
upright  and  speak  the  truth  plainly. 

For  myself— if  a  personal  confession  is  not 
here  out  of  place— I  shrink  always  from  profiting 
by  any  license  I  have  just  claimed  for  others;  I 
strive  always  to  eschew  the  Split  Infinitive,  to 
avoid  and  who  when  there  is  no  preceding  who 
which  may  balance  it,  and  to  put  only  always  in 
the  place  where  it  will  do  most  good.  It  is  ever 
my  aim  to  avail  myself  of  the  phrase  which  will 
convey  my  meaning  into  the  reader's  mind  with 
the  least  friction ;  and  out  of  the  effort  to  achieve 
this  approach  along  the  line  of  least  resistance,  I 
get  something  of  the  joy  an  honest  craftsman 
ought  always  to  feel  in  the  handling  of  his  tools. 
For  this  is  what  words  are,  after  all ;  they  are  the 
tools  of  man,  devised  to  serve  his  daily  needs. 
As  Bagehot  once  suggested,  we  may  not  know 
how  language  was  first  invented  and  made,  "  but 
beyond  doubt  it  was  shaped  and  fashioned  into 
237 


QUESTIONS   OF   USAGE 

its  present  state  by  common,  ordinary  men  and 
women  using  it  for  common  and  ordinary  pur- 
poses. They  wanted  a  carving-knife,  not  a  razor 
or  lancet;  and  those  great  artists  who  have  to 
use  language  for  more  exquisite  purposes,  who 
employ  it  to  describe  changing  sentiments  and 
momentary  fancies  and  the  fluctuating  and  in- 
definite inner  world,  must  use  curious  nicety  and 
hidden  but  effectual  artifice,  else  they  cannot 
duly  punctuate  their  thoughts  and  slice  the  fine 
edges  of  their  reflections.  A  hair's  breadth  is  as 
important  to  them  as  a  yard's  breadth  to  a  com- 
mon workman." 
(1898) 


238 


X 

AN  INQUIRY  AS  TO  RIME 


AN   INQUIRY  AS  TO   RIME 

'  ¥  HAVE  a  theory  about  double  rimes  for  which 
I  I  shall  be  attacked  by  the  critics,  but  which 
I  could  justify  perhaps  on  high  authority,  or,  at 
least,  analogy,"  wrote  Mrs.  Browning  to  a  friend 
not  long  after  the  publication  of  one  of  her  books. 
"  These  volumes  of  mine  have  more  double  rimes 
than  any  two  books  of  English  poems  that  ever 
to  my  knowledge  were  printed;  I  mean  of  Eng- 
lish poems  not  comic.  Now  of  double  rimes  in 
use  which  are  perfect  rimes  you  are  aware  how 
few  there  are ;  and  yet  you  are  also  aware  of  what 
an  admirable  effect  in  making  a  rhythm  various 
and  vigorous  double  riming  is  in  English  poetry. 
Therefore  I  have  used  a  certain  license;  and  after 
much  thoughtful  study  of  the  Elizabethan  writers 
have  ventured  it  with  the  public.  And  do  you 
tell  me— you  who  object  to  the  use  of  a  different 
vowel  in  a  double  rime— why  you  rime  (as  every- 
body does,  without  blame  from  everybody)  given 
to  heaven,  when  you  object  to  my  riming  remem- 
ber to  chamber  ?  The  analogy  is  all  on  my  side, 
241 


AN   INQUIRY   AS  TO  RIME 

and  I  believe  that  the  spirit  of  the  English  lan- 
guage is  also." 

Here  Mrs.  Browning  raises  a  question  of  in- 
terest to  all  who  have  paid  any  attention  to  the 
technic  of  verse.  No  doubt  double  rimes  do 
give  vigor  and  variety  to  a  poem,  altho  no 
modern  English  lyrist  has  really  rivaled  the  mag- 
nificent medieval  'Dies  Irse,'  wherein  the  double 
rimes  thrice  repeated  fall  one  after  the  other  like 
the  beating  of  mighty  trip-hammers.  There  is 
no  doubt  also  that  the  English  language  is  not  so 
fertile  in  double  rimes  as  the  Latin,  the  German, 
or  the  Italian ;  and  that  some  of  the  English  poets, 
clutching  for  these  various  and  vigorous  effects, 
have  refused  to  abide  by  the  strict  letter  of  the 
law,  and  have  claimed  the  license  of  modifying 
the  emphatic  vowel  from  one  line  to  another. 
Mrs.  Browning  defends  this  revolt,  and  finds  it 
easy  to  retort  to  her  correspondent  that  he  him- 
self has  ventured  to  link  heaven  and  given.  Many 
another  poet  has  coupled  these  unwilling  words; 
and  not  a  few  have  also  married  river  and  ever, 
meadow  and  shadow,  spirit  and  inherit. 

Mrs.  Browning  is  prepared  to  justify  herself  by 
authority,  or  at  least  by  analogy ;  and  yet,  in  bring- 
ing about  the  espousal  of  chamber  and  remember, 
she  is  evidently  aware  that  it  is  no  love-match 
she  is  aiding  and  abetting,  but  at  best  a  marriage 
of  .convenience  She  pleads  precedence  to  excuse 
242 


AN  INQUIRY   AS  TO   RIME 

her  infraction  of  a  statute  the  general  validity  of 
which  she  apparently  admits.  The  most  that  she 
claims  is  that  the  tying  together  of  chamber  and 
remember  is  permissible.  She  seems  to  say  that 
these  ill-mated  pairs  are,  of  course,  not  the  best 
possible  rimes,  but  that,  since  double  rimes  are 
scarce  in  English,  the  lyrist  may,  now  and  then, 
avail  himself  of  the  second  best.  An  American 
poet  of  my  acquaintance  is  bolder  than  the  British 
poetess;  he  has  the  full  courage  of  his  convic- 
tions. He  assures  me  that  he  takes  pleasure  in 
the  tying  together  of  incompatible  words  like 
river  and  ever,  meadow  and  shadow,  finding  in 
these  arbitrary  matings  a  capricious  and  agreeable 
relief  from  the  monotony  of  more  regular  riming. 

This  forces  us  to  consider  the  basis  upon  which 
any  theory  of  "  allowable  "  rimes  must  rest— any 
theory,  that  is,  which,  after  admitting  that  certain 
rimes  are  exact  and  absolutely  adequate,  asserts 
also  that  certain  other  combinations  of  terminal 
words,  altho  they  do  not  rime  completely  and 
to  the  satisfaction  of  all,  are  still  tolerable.  This 
theory  accepts  certain  rimes  as  good,  and  it  claims 
in  addition  certain  others  as  "  good  enough." 

Any  objection  to  the  pairing  of  spirit  and  in- 
herit, of  remember  and  chamber,  and  the  like, 
cannot  be  founded  upon  the  fact  that  in  the  ac- 
cepted orthography  of  the  English  language  the 
spelling  of  the  terminations  differs.  Rime  has  to 
243 


AN   INQUIRY   AS  TO   RIME 

do  with  pronunciation  and  not  with  orthography; 
rime  is  a  match  between  sounds.  The  symbols 
that  represent  these  sounds— or  that  may  misre- 
present them  more  or  less  violently— are  of  little 
consequence.  What  is  absurdly  called  a  "  rime 
to  the  eye  "  is  a  flagrant  impossibility,  or  else  hic- 
cough may  pair  off  with  enough,  clean  with  ocean, 
and  plague  with  ague.  The  eye  is  not  the  judge  of 
sound,  any  more  than  the  nose  is  the  judge  of 
color.  Height  is  not  a  rime  to  eight;  but  it  is  a 
rime  to  sight,  to  bite,  to  proselyte,  and  to  indict. 
So  one  does  not  rime  with  either  gone  or  tone ; 
but  it  does  with  son  and  with  bun.  Tomb  and 
comb,  and  rhomb  and  bomb  are  not  rimes;  but 
tomb  and  doom,  and  spume  and  rheum  are.  The 
objection  to  the  linking  together  of  meadow  and 
shadow,  and  of  ever  and  river  is  far  deeper  than 
any  superficial  difference  of  spelling;  it  is  rooted 
in  the  difference  of  the  sounds  themselves.  In 
spite  of  the  invention  of  printing,  or  even  of 
writing  itself,  the  final  appeal  of  poetry  is  still  to 
the  ear  and  not  to  the  eye. 

Probably  the  first  utterances  of  man  were 
rhythmic,  and  probably  poetry  had  advanced  far 
toward  perfection  long  before  the  alphabet  was 
devised  as  an  occasional  substitute  for  speech. 
In  the  beginning  the  poet  had  to  charm  the  ears 
of  those  whom  he  sought  to  move,  since  there 
was  then  no  way  by  which  he  could  reach  the 
244 


AN   INQUIRY   AS  TO   RIME 

eye  also.  To  the  rhapsodists  verse  was  an  oral 
art  solely,  as  it  is  always  for  the  dramatists, 
whose  speeches  must  fall  trippingly  from  the 
tongue,  or  fail  of  their  effect.  The  work  of  the 
lyrist— writer  of  odes,  minnesinger,  troubadour, 
ballad-minstrel—has  always  been  intended  to  be 
said  or  sung;  that  it  should  be  read  is  an  after- 
thought only.  Even  to-day,  when  the  printing- 
press  has  us  all  under  its  wheels,  it  is  by  our 
tongues  that  we  possess  ourselves  of  the  poetry 
we  truly  relish.  A  poem  is  not  really  ours  till 
we  know  it  by  heart  and  can  say  it  to  ourselves, 
or  at  least  until  we  have  read  it  aloud,  and  until 
we  can  quote  it  freely.  If  a  poem  has  actually 
taken  hold  on  our  souls,  it  rings  in  our  ears,  even 
if  we  happen  to  be  visualizers  also,  and  can  call 
up  at  will  the  printed  page  whereon  it  is  pre- 
served. 

This  fact,  that  poetry  is  primarily  meant  to  be 
spoken  aloud  rather  than  read  silently,  altho 
obvious  when  plainly  stated,  has  not  been  firmly 
grasped  by  many  of  those  who  have  considered 
the  technic  of  the  art,  and  therefore  there  is  often 
obscurity  in  the  current  discussions  of  rime  and 
rhythm.  In  the  rhetoric  of  verse  there  is  to-day 
not  a  little  of  the  confusion  which  existed  in  the 
rhetoric  of  prose  before  Herbert  Spencer  put  forth 
his  illuminating  and  stimulating  essay  on  the 
'Philosophy  of  Style.'  Even  in  that  paper  he 
245 


AN   INQUIRY   AS   TO   RIME 

suggested  that  the  principle  of  Economy  of  At- 
tention was  as  applicable  to  verse  as  to  prose; 
and  he  remarked  that  "  were  there  space,  it  might 
be  worth  while  to  inquire  whether  the  pleasure 
we  take  in  rime,  and  also  that  which  we  take  in 
euphony,  are  not  partly  ascribable  to  the  same 
general  cause." 

This  principle  of  Economy  of  Attention  ex- 
plains why  it  is  that  any  style  of  speaking  or 
writing  is  more  effective  than  another,  by  remind- 
ing us  that  we  have,  at  any  given  moment,  only 
so  much  power  of  attention,  and  that,  there- 
fore, however  much  of  this  power  has  to  be 
employed  on  the  form  of  any  message  must  be 
subtracted  from  the  total  power,  leaving  just  so 
much  less  attention  available  for  the  apprehen- 
sion of  the  message  itself.  To  convey  a  thought 
from  one  mind  to  another,  we  must  use  words 
the  reception  of  which  demands  more  or  less 
mental  exertion ;  and  therefore  that  statement  is 
best  which  carries  the  thought  with  the  least 
verbal  friction.  Some  friction  there  must  be 
always;  but  the  less  there  is,  the  more  power  of 
attention  the  recipient  has  left  to  master  the  trans- 
mitted thought. 

It  is  greatly  to  be  regretted  that  Spencer  did 
not  spare  the  space  to  apply  to  verse  this  prin- 
ciple, which  has  been  so  helpful  in  the  analysis 
of  prose.  He  did  go  so  far  as  to  suggest  that 
246 


AN   INQUIRY  AS  TO   RIME 

metrical  language  is  more  effective  than  prose, 
because  when  "  we  habitually  preadjust  our  per- 
ceptions to  the  measured  movement  of  verse  "  it 
is  "  probable  that  by  so  doing  we  economize 
attention."  This  suggestion  has  been  elaborated 
by  one  of  his  disciples,  the  late  Mr.  Grant  Allen,  in 
his  treatise  on  '  Physiological  Esthetics,'  and  it  has 
been  formally  controverted  by  the  late  Mr.  Gur- 
ney,  in  his  essay  on  the  'Power  of  Sound.' 
Perhaps  both  Spencer  and  Gurney  are  right;  part 
of  our  pleasure  in  rhythm  is  due  to  the  fact  that 
"  the  mind  may  economize  its  energies  by  antici- 
pating the  attention  required  for  each  syllable," 
as  the  former  says,  and  part  of  it  is  "  of  an  en- 
tirely positive  kind,  acting  directly  on  the  sense," 
as  the  latter  maintains. 

Whether  or  not  Spencer's  principle  of  Economy 
of  Attention  adequately  explains  our  delight  in 
rhythm,  there  is  no  doubt  that  it  can  easily  be 
utilized  to  construct  a  theory  of  rime.  Indeed, 
it  is  the  one  principle  which  provides  a  satisfac- 
tory solution  to  the  problem  propounded  by  Mrs. 
Browning.  No  one  can  deny  that  more  or  less 
of  our  enjoyment  of  rimed  verse  is  due  to  the 
skill  with  which  the  poet  satisfies  with  the  second 
rime  the  expectation  he  has  aroused  with  the 
first.  When  he  ends  a  line  with  gray,  or  grow, 
or  grand,  we  do  not  know  which  of  the  two- 
score  or  more  of  possible  rimes  to  each  of  these 
247 


AN   INQUIRY   AS  TO  RIME 

the  lyrist  will  select,  and  we  await  his  choice 
with  happy  anticipation.  If  he  should  balk  us  of 
our  pleasure,  if  he  should  omit  the  rime  we  had 
confidently  counted  upon,  we  are  rudely  awak- 
ened from  our  dream  of  delight,  and  we  ask  our- 
selves abruptly  what  has  happened.  It  is  as 
tho  the  train  of  thought  had  run  off  the  track. 
Spencer  notes  how  we  are  put  out  by  halting 
versification ;  "  much  as  at  the  bottom  of  a  flight 
of  stairs  a  step  more  or  less  than  we  counted 
upon  gives  us  a  shock,  so  too  does  a  misplaced 
accent  or  a  supernumerary  syllable." 

So,  too,  does  an  inaccurate  or  an  arbitrary  rime 
give  us  a  shock.  If  verse  is  something  to  be  said 
or  sung,  if  its  appeal  is  to  the  ear  primarily,  if 
rime  is  a  terminal  identity  of  sound,  then  any 
theory  of  "allowable"  rimes  is  impossible,  since 
an  "allowable"  rime  is  necessarily  inexact,  and 
thus  may  tend  to  withdraw  attention  from  the 
matter  of  the  poem  to  its  manner.  No  doubt 
there  are  readers  who  do  not  notice  the  incom- 
patibility of  these  matings,  and  there  are  others 
who  notice  yet  do  not  care.  But  the  more  accu- 
rately trained  the  ear  is,  the  more  likely  these 
alliances  are  to  annoy ;  and  the  less  exact  the  rime, 
the  more  likely  the  ear  is  to  discover  the  discre- 
pancy. The  only  safety  for  the  rimester  who 
wishes  to  be  void  of  all  offense  is  to  risk  no 
union  of  sounds  against  whose  marriage  anybody 
248 


AN   INQUIRY   AS  TO   RIME 

knows  any  just  cause  of  impediment.  Perhaps 
a  wedding  within  the  prohibited  degrees  may  be 
allowed  to  pass  without  protest  now  and  again; 
but  sooner  or  later  somebody  will  surely  forbid 
the  banns. 

Just  as  a  misplaced  accent  or  a  supernumerary 
syllable  gives  us  a  shock,  so  does  the  attempt  of 
Mrs.  Browning  to  pair  off  remember  and  chamber  ; 
so  may  also  the  attempt  of  Poe  to  link  together 
valleys  and  palace.  The  lapse  from  the  perfect 
ideal  may  be  but  a  trifle,  but  a  lapse  it  is  never- 
theless. A  certain  percentage  of  our  available 
attention  may  thus  be  wasted,  and  worse  than 
wasted;  it  may  be  called  away  from  the  poem 
itself,  and  absorbed  suddenly  by  the  mere  versi- 
fication. For  a  brief  moment  we  may  be  forced 
to  consider  a  defect  of  form,  when  we  ought  to 
have  our  minds  absolutely  free  to  receive  the 
poet's  meaning.  Whenever  a  poet  cheats  us  of 
our  expectancy  of  perfect  rime,  he  forces  us  to 
pay  exorbitant  freight  charges  on  the  gift  he  has 
presented  to  us. 

It  is  to  be  noted,  however,  that  as  rime  is  a 
matching  of  sounds,  certain  pairs  of  words  whose 
union  is  not  beyond  reproach  can  hardly  be  re- 
jected without  pedantry,  since  the  ordinary  pro- 
nunciation of  cultivated  men  takes  no  account  of 
the  slight  differences  of  sound  audible  if  the 
words  are'uttered  with  absolute  precision.  Thus 
249 


AN   INQUIRY   AS  TO   RIME 

Tennyson  in  the  '  Revenge '  rimes  Devon  and 
Heaven  ;  and  thus  Lowell  in  the  '  Fable  for  Cri- 
tics '  rimes  irresistible  and  untwistable.  In  '  Elsie 
Venner'  Dr.  Holmes  held  up  to  derision  "the 
inevitable  rime  of  cockney  and  Yankee  beginners, 
morn  and  dawn" \  but,  at  the  risk  of  revealing 
myself  as  a  Yankee  of  New  York,  I  must  confess 
that  any  pronunciation  of  this  pair  of  words 
seems  to  me  stilted  that  does  not  make  them 
quite  impeccable  as  a  rime. 

We  are  warned,  however,  to  be  on  our  guard 
against  pushing  any  principle  to  an  absurd  ex- 
treme. If  certain  pairs  of  words  have  been  sent 
forth  into  the  world  by  English  poets  from  a  time 
whereof  the  memory  of  man  runneth  not  to  the 
contrary,  then  perhaps  they  may  now  plead  pre- 
scription whenever  any  cold-hearted  commen- 
tator is  disposed  to  doubt  the  legitimacy  of  their 
conjunction.  Altho  the  union  is  forbidden  by 
the  strict  letter  of  the  law,— like  marriage  with  a 
deceased  wife's  sister  in  England,— only  the  cen- 
sorious are  disposed  to  take  the  matter  into  court. 
In  time  certain  rimes— falsely  so  called— "are 
legitimated  by  custom,"  one  British  critic  has 
declared,  citing  love  and  prove,  for  example,  and 
asserting  that  "  river  has  just  got  to  rime  with 
ever  or  the  game  cannot  be  played."  You  must 
have  forgiven  or  you  will  never  get  to  heaven. 
"We  expect  these  licenses  and  do  not  resent 
250 


AN   INQUIRY   AS  TO   RIME 

them,  as  we  do  resent  Poe's  valleys  and  palace 
and  the  eccentricities  of  Mrs.  Browning."  That 
there  is  force  in  this  contention  cannot  be  denied ; 
but  it  must  be  remembered  that  those  who  urge 
it  are  necessarily  lovers  of  poetry,  or  at  least  fairly 
familiar  with  a  large  body  of  English  verse,  or 
else  they  would  not  be  aware  of  the  fact  that  love 
and  prove,  heaven  and  given,  have  often  been  tied 
together.  But  even  if  these  critics,  who  have 
been  sophisticated  by  over-familiarity  with  poetic 
license,  do  not  resent  this  pairing  of  unequal 
sounds,  it  does  not  follow  that  those  who  for  the 
first  time  hear  dove  linked  with  Jove  are  equally 
forgiving  or  negligent.  Even  if  these  licenses 
are  pardoned  by  some  as  venial  offenses,  there 
are  others  whose  ears  are  annoyed  by  them  and 
whose  attention  is  distracted.  In  other  words, 
we  are  here  face  to  face  with  the  personal  equa- 
tion ;  and  the  only  way  for  a  writer  of  verse  to 
be  certain  that  one  or  another  of  his  rimes  will 
not  be  resented  by  this  reader  or  that  is  to  make 
sure  that  all  his  marriages  are  flawless. 

Thus  and  thus  only  can  he  avoid  offense  with 
absolute  certainty.  If  his  rimes  are  perfect  to  the 
ear  when  read  aloud  or  recited,  then  they  will 
never  divert  the  attention  of  the  auditor  from  the 
matter  of  the  poem  to  the  mere  manner.  On  the 
other  hand,  it  is  only  fair  to  confess  that  there 
are  some  lovers  of  poetry  who  find  a  charm  in 
251 


AN   INQUIRY   AS  TO   RIME 

lawlessness  and  in  eccentricity.  A  series  of  per- 
fect rimes  pleases  them;  but  so  also  does  an 
occasional  rime  in  which  the  vowel  is  slightly 
varied.  And  the  poet's  consolation  for  the  loss 
of  these  must  lie  in  the  knowledge  that  he  can- 
not hope  to  satisfy  everybody.  Consolation  may 
lie  also  in  the  belief  that  any  lapse  from  the  per- 
fect rime  is  dangerous,  for  even  if  there  are  some 
who  enjoy  the  divergence  when  it  is  delicate,— 
that  is,  when  the  vowel  sound,  even  if  not  abso- 
lutely identical,  is  sympathetically  akin,— there 
are  very  few  who  are  not  annoyed  when  the 
difference  becomes  as  obvious  as  in  the  attempt 
to  link  together  dial  and  ball  or  water  and  clear. 
And  as  it  is  only  a  sophisticated  ear  which  en- 
joys the  mating  of  valleys  with  palace,  for  ex- 
ample, so  the  attempted  rime  of  this  type  is  to 
be  found  chiefly  in  the  more  labored  poets— in 
those  who  are  consciously  literary.  The  primi- 
tive lyrist,  the  unconscious  singer  who  makes  a 
ballad  of  a  May  morning  or  rimes  a  jingle  for  the 
nursery  or  puts  together  a  couplet  to  give  point 
to  a  fragment  of  proverbial  wisdom,  is  nearly 
always  exact  in  the  repetition  of  his  vowel. 
Where  he  is  careless  is  in  the  accompanying 
consonants.  As  is  remarked  by  the  British  critic 
from  whom  quotation  has  already  been  made, 
"we  may  observe  that  in  all  early  European 
poetry,  from  the  '  Song  of  Roland '  to  the  popular 
252 


AN   INQUIRY   AS  TO   RIME 

ballads,  the  ear  was  satisfied  with  assonance,  that 
is,  the  harmony  of  the  vowel  sounds;  bat  is  as- 
sonant to  tag,  and  that  was  good  enough."  So 
in  the  proverbial  couplet, 

See  a  pin  and  pick  it  up, 

All  day  long  you  '11  have  good  luck. 

So  again  more  than  once  in  the  unaffected  lyrics 
of  the  laureate  of  the  nursery,  Mother  Goose: 

Goosy,  goosy  gander, 

Where  do  you  wander? 
Upstairs  and  downstairs, 

And  in  my  lady's  chamber. 

Leave  them  alone 

And  they  will  come  borne. 

This  assonance  is  visible  in  the  linking  of  wild 
wood  and  childhood,  which  many  versifiers  have 
proffered  as  tho  it  was  a  double  rime ;  it  is  to 
be  seen  again  in  Whittier's  main  land  and  train- 
band ;  and  it  is  obvious  in  Mr.  Bret  Harte's  '  Her 
Letter ' : 

Of  that  ride— that  to  me  was  the  rarest; 

Of —the  something  you  said  at  the  gate. 
Ah!  Joe,  then  I  was  n't  an  heiress 

To  the  best-paying  lead  in  the  State. 

Altho  this  substitution  of  assonance  for  rime 
is  uncommon  in  the  more  literary  lyrics,  which 

253 


AN   INQUIRY   AS  TO   RIME 

we  may  suppose  to  have  been  composed  with 
the  pen,  it  is  still  frequently  to  be  found  in  the 
popular  song,  born  on  the  lips  of  the  singer,  and 
set  down  in  black  and  white  only  as  an  after- 
thought. It  abounds  in  the  college  songs  which 
have  been  sung  into  being,  and  in  the  brisk  bal- 
lads of  the  variety-show— which  Planche  neatly 
characterized  as  "  most  music-hall,  most  melan- 
choly." In  one  dime  song-book  containing  the 
words  set  to  music  by  Mr.  David  Braham  to  en- 
liven one  of  Mr.  Edward  Harrigan's  amusing 
pictures  of  life  among  the  lowly  in  the  tenement- 
house  districts  of  New  York,  there  can  be  dis- 
covered at  least  a  dozen  instances  of  this  use  of 
assonance  as  tho  it  were  rime : 

De  gal's  name  is  Nannie, 

And  she  's  just  left  her  mammie. 

He  can  get  a  pair  of  crutches 
From  the  doctor,  it  's  well  known, 

And  feel  like  the  King  of  Persia, 
When  he  goes  marching  borne. 

One  husband  was  a  toper , 
The  other  was  a  loafer. 

'T  is  there  the  solid  voters 
Wear  Piccadilly  chokers. 

On  Sundays,  then,  the  ladies 

With  a  hundred  million  babies. 

254 


AN   INQUIRY   AS   TO   RIME 

To  the  poor  of  suffering  Ireland: 

Time  and  time  again  ; 
We  thank  you  for  our  countrymen, 

And  Donavan  is  our  name. 

When  these  lines  are  sung,  rough  as  they  are, 
the  ear  is  satisfied  by  the  absolute  identity  of  the 
final  vowel,  upon  which  the  voice  lingers— while 
the  final  consonant  is  elided  or  almost  suppressed. 
It  may  be  doubted  whether  one  in  a  hundred  of 
those  who  heard  these  songs  ever  discovered  any 
deficiency  in  the  rimes.  In  more  literary  ballads 
only  an  exact  rime  attains  to  the  sterling  standard ; 
but  in  folk-songs,  ancient  and  modern,  assonance 
seems  to  be  legal  tender  by  tacit  convention. 
When  Benedick  was  trying  to  make  a  copy  of 
verses  for  Beatrice,  he  declared  that  he  could 
"find  out  no  rime  to  lady  but  baby,  an  inno- 
cent rime  "—a  remark  which  shows  us  that  Bene- 
dick's theory  of  riming  was  much  the  same  as 
Mr.  Harrigan's. 

Probably,  however,  the  attempt  to  substitute 
assonance  for  rime  would  be  resented  by  many 
of  the  readers  who  are  tolerant  toward  such  de- 
partures from  exactness  as  heaven  and  shriven  or 
grove  and  dove.  That  is  to  say,  the  unliterary  ear 
insists  on  the  identity  of  the  vowel  while  careless 
as  to  the  consonant,  and  the  literary  ear  insists  on 
the  identity  of  the  consonant  while  not  quite  so 
careful  as  to  the  vowel.  And  here  is  another 


AN   INQUIRY   AS  TO   RIME 

reason  for  exact  accuracy,  which  satisfies  alike 
the  learned  and  the  unlearned,  and  is  also  in 
accord  with  Herbert  Spencer's  principle.  It  is 
true,  probably,  that  such  minor  divergencies  as 
the  mating  of  borne  and  alone  and  of  shadow  and 
meadow— to  take  one  of  each  class— are  not  gene- 
rally conscious  on  the  part  of  the  poet  himself. 
Nor  are  they  generally  noticed  by  the  reader  or 
the  auditor;  and  even  when  noticed  they  are  not 
always  resented  as  offensive.  But  just  so  long 
as  there  is  a  chance  that  they  may  be  noticed  and 
that  they  may  be  resented,  they  had  best  be 
avoided.  The  poet  avails  himself  of  his  license 
at  his  peril.  That  way  danger  lies. 

It  is  in  the  '  Adventures  of  Philip '  that  Thacke- 
ray records  his  hero's  disapproval  of  a  poet  who 
makes  fire  rime  with  Marire.  Even  if  the  rime 
is  made  accurate  to  the  ear,  it  is  only  by  convict- 
ing the  lyrist  of  carelessness  of  speech— not  to 
call  it  vulgarity  of  pronunciation.  But  Dr.  Holmes 
himself,  sharp  as  he  was  upon  those  who  rimed 
dawn  and  morn,  was  none  the  less  guilty  of  a 
peccadillo  quite  as  reprehensible— Elizas  and  ad- 
vertisers. Whittier  ventured  to  chain  Eva  not 
only  with  leave  her  and  receive  her,  which  sug- 
gest a  slovenly  utterance,  but  also  with  give  her, 
river,  and  never,  which  are  all  of  them  wrenched 
from  their  true  sounds  to  force  them  unto  a  vain 
and  empty  semblance  of  a  rime.  A  kindred 
256 


AN   INQUIRY   AS  TO   RIME 

cockney  recklessness  can  be  found  in  one  of 
Mrs.  Browning's  misguided  modernizations  of 
Chaucer: 

Now  grant  my  ship  some  smooth  haven  win  her  ; 
\  follow  Statius  first,  and  then  Corinna. 

In  each  of  these  cases  the  poet  takes  out  a  wed- 
ding license  for  his  couplet,  only  at  the  cost  of 
compelling  the  reader  to  miscall  the  names  of 
these  ladies,  and  to  address  them  as  Marire, 
Either,  Ever,  and  Corinner ;  and  tho  the  rimes 
themselves  are  thus  placed  beyond  reproach,  the 
poet  is  revealed  as  regardless  of  all  delicacy  and 
precision  of  speech.  Surely  such  a  vulgarity  of 
pronunciation  is  as  disenchanting  as  any  vulgarity 
in  grammar. 

Not  quite  so  broad  in  the  mispronunciation  that 
makes  these  rimes  are  certain  of  Mr.  Kipling's, 
as  to  which  we  are  a  little  in  doubt  whether  he 
is  making  his  rime  by  violence  to  the  normal 
sound  or  whether  his  own  pronunciation  is  so 
abnormal  that  the  rime  itself  seems  to  him  accu- 
rate: 

Railways  and  roads  they  wrought 
For  the  needs  of  the  soil  within ; 

A  time  to  scribble  in  court. 
A  time  to  bear  and  grin. 

Long  he  pondered  o'er  the  question  in  his  scantly  furnished 

quarters, 
Then  proposed  to  Minnie  Boffkin,  eldest  of  Judge  Boffkin's 

daughters. 

257 


AN   INQUIRY   AS   TO   RIME 

I  quarrel  with  my  wife  at  home. 

We  never  fight  abroad; 
But  Mrs.  B.  has  grasped  the  fact, 

I  am  her  only  lord. 

Far  less  offensive  than  this  wilful  slovenliness, 
and  yet  akin  to  it,  is  the  trick  of  forcing  an  em- 
phasis upon  a  final  syllable  which  is  naturally 
short,  in  order  that  it  may  be  made  to  rime  with 
a  syllable  which  is  naturally  long.  For  example, 
in  the  exquisite  lyric  of  Lovelace's,  '  To  Althea 
from  Prison,'  in  the  second  quatrain  of  the  second 
stanza  we  find  that  we  must  prolong  the  final 
syllable  of  the  final  word : 

When  thirsty  grief  in  wine  we  steep, 
When  healths  and  draughts  go  free, 

Fishes  that  tipple  in  the  deep 
Know  no  such  liberf^. 

Here  the  rime  evades  us  unless  we  read  the 
last  word  libertee.  But  what  then  are  we  to  do 
with  the  same  word  in  the  second  quatrain  of  the 
first  stanza  ?  To  get  his  rime  here,  the  poet  in- 
sists on  our  reading  the  last  word  libertie  : 

When  I  lie  tangled  in  her  hair 

And  fettered  to  her  eye, 
The  birds  that  wanton  in  the  air 

Know  no  such  liber/y. 

Lovelace  thus  forces  us  not  only  to  give  an 
arbitrary  pronunciation  to  the  final  word  of  his 
258 


AN   INQUIRY   AS  TO   RIME 

refrain,  but  also  to  vary  this  arbitrary  pronuncia- 
tion from  stanza  to  stanza,  awkwardly  arresting 
our  attention  to  no  purpose,  when  we  ought  to 
be  yielding  ourselves  absolutely  to  the  charm  of 
his  most  charming  poem.  Many  another  instance 
of  this  defect  in  craftsmanship  can  be  discovered 
in  the  English  poets,  one  of  them  in  a  lyric  by 
that  master  of  metrics,  Poe,  who  opens  the 
'  Haunted  Palace '  with  a  quatrain  in  which  ten- 
anted is  made  to  mate  with  head : 

In  the  greenest  of  our  valleys, 

By  good  angels  ten  an  ted, 
Once  a  fair  and  stately  palace — 

Radiant  palace  —  reared  its  bead. 

In  the  one  poem  of  Walt  Whitman's  in  which 
he  seemed  almost  willing  to  submit  to  the  bonds 
of  rime  and  meter,  and  which— perhaps  for  that 
reason  partly— is  the  lyric  of  his  now  best  known 
and  best  beloved,  in '  O  Captain,  My  Captain,' 
certain  of  the  rimes  are  possible  only  by  putting 
an  impossible  stress  upon  the  final  syllables  of 
both  words  of  the  pair: 

The  port  is  near,  the  bells  I  hear,  the  people  all  exulting, 
While  follow  eyes  the  steady  keel,  the  vessel  grim  and  daring. 

And  again: 

For  you  bouquets  and  ribbon'd  wreaths,  for  you  the  shores 

a-crowding  ; 

For  you  they  call,  the  swaying  mass,  their  eager  faces  turning, 
259 


AN   INQUIRY   AS  TO   RIME 

In  all  these  cases— Lovelace's,  Poe's,  Whit- 
man's—we find  that  the  principle  of  Economy  of 
Attention  has  been  violated,  with  a  resulting 
shock  which  diminishes  somewhat  our  pleasure 
in  the  poems,  delightful  as  they  are,  each  in  its 
several  way.  We  have  been  called  to  bestow  a 
momentary  consideration  on  the  mechanism  of 
the  poem,  when  we  should  have  preferred  to 
reserve  all  our  power  to  receive  the  beauty  of  its 
spirit. 

It  may  be  doubted  whether  any  pronunciation, 
however  violently  dislocated,  can  justify  Whit- 
tier's  joining  of  bruised  and  crusade  in  his  '  To 
England,'  or  Browning's  conjunction  of  -windows 
and  Hindus  in  his  'Youth  and  Art'  In  '  Cris- 
tina'  Browning  tries  to  combine  moments  and 
endowments ;  in  his  'Another  Way  of  Love'  he 
conjoins  spider  and  consider ;  and  in  his  'Solilo- 
quy in  a  Spanish  Cloister'  he  binds  together 
horse-hairs  and  corsair's.  Perhaps  one  reason 
why  Browning  has  made  his  way  so  slowly  with 
the  broad  public— whom  every  poet  must  conquer 
at  last,  or  in  the  end  confess  defeat— is  that  his 
rimes  are  sometimes  violent  and  awkward,  and 
sometimes  complicated  and  arbitrary.  The  poet 
has  reveled  in  his  own  ingenuity  in  compounding 
them,  and  so  he  flourishes  them  in  the  face  of 
the  reader.  The  principle  of  Economy  of  Atten- 
tion demands  that  in  serious  verse  the  rime  must 
260 


AN   INQUIRY   AS  TO   RIME 

be  not  only  so  accurate  as  to  escape  remark,  but 
also  wholly  unstrained.  It  must  seem  natural, 
necessary,  obvious,  even  inevitable,  or  else  our 
minds  are  wrested  from  a  rapt  contemplation  of 
the  theme  to  a  disillusioning  consideration  of  the 
sounds  by  which  it  is  bodied  forth. 

"  Really  the  meter  of  some  of  the  modern 
poems  I  have  read,"  said  Coleridge,  "  bears  about 
the  same  relation  to  meter,  properly  understood, 
that  dumb-bells  do  to  music;  both  are  for  exer- 
cise, and  pretty  severe  too,  I  think."  A  master 
of  meter  Browning  proved  himself  again  and 
again,  very  inventive  in  the  new  rhythms  he  in- 
troduced, and  almost  unfailingly  felicitous;  and 
yet  there  are  poems  of  his  in  which  the  rimes 
impose  on  the  reader  a  steady  muscular  exercise. 
In  the  'Glove,'  for  example,  there  not  only 
abound  manufactured  rimes,  each  of  which  in 
turn  arrests  the  attention,  and  each  of  which 
demands  a  most  conscientious  articulation  before 
the  ear  can  apprehend  it,  but  with  a  persistent 
perversity  the  poet  puts  the  abnormal  combina- 
tion first,  and  puts  last  the  normal  word  with 
which  it  is  to  be  united  in  wedlock.  Thus  agbast 
I  'm  precedes  pastime,  and  well  swear  comes  be- 
fore elsewhere.  This  is  like  presenting  us  with 
the  answer  before  propounding  the  riddle. 

In  comic  verse,  of  course,  difficulty  gaily  van- 
quished may  be  a  part  of  the  joke,  and  an  adroit 
261 


AN   INQUIRY   AS  TO  RIME 

and  unexpected  rime  may  be  a  witticism  in  itself. 
But  irr  the  '  Ingoldsby  Legends  '  and  in  the  '  Fable 
for  Critics '  it  is  generally  the  common  word  that 
comes  before  the  uncommon  combination  the 
alert  rimester  devises  to  accompany  it.  When  a 
line  of  Barham's  ends  with  Mepbistopheles  we 
wonder  how  he  is  going  to  solve  the  difficulty, 
and  our  expectation  is  swiftly  gratified  with 
coffee  lees;  and  when  Lowell  informs  us  that 
Poe 

.   .    .   talks  like  a  book  of  iambs  and  pentameters, 

we  bristle  our  ears  while  he  adds : 

In  a  way  to  make  people  of  common  sense  damn  meters. 

But  the  'Glove'  is  not  comic  in  intent;  the 
core  of  it  is  tragic,  and  the  shell  is  at  least  ro- 
mantic. Perhaps  a  hard  and  brilliant  playfulness 
of  treatment  might  not  be  out  of  keeping  with 
the  psychologic  subtlety  of  its  catastrophe;  but 
not  a  few  readers  resentfully  reject  the  misplaced 
ingenuity  of  the  wilfully  artificial  double  rimes. 
The  incongruity  between  the  matter  of  the  poem 
and  the  manner  of  it  attracts  attention  to  the  form, 
and  leaves  us  the  less  for  the  fact. 

It  would  be  interesting  to  know  just  why 
Browning  chose  to  do  what  he  did  in  the  '  Glove ' 
and  in  more  than  one  other  poem.  He  had  his 
reasons,  doubtless,  for  he  was  no  unconscious 
warbler  of  unpremeditated  lays.  If  he  refused  to 
262 


AN   INQUIRY    AS  TO   RIME 

be  loyal  to  the  principle  of  Economy  of  Attention, 
he  knew  what  he  was  doing.  It  was  not  from 
any  heedlessness— like  that  of  Emerson  when  he 
recklessly  rimed  woodpecker  with  bear ;  or  like 
that  of  Lowell  when  he  boldly  insisted  on  riming 
the  same  woodpecker  with  bear.  Emerson  and 
Lowell— and  Whittier  also— it  may  be  noted, 
were  none  of  them  enamoured  of  technic;  and 
when  a  couplet  or  a  quatrain  or  a  stanza  of  theirs 
happened  to  attain  perfection,  as  not  infrequently 
they  do,  we  cannot  but  feel  it  to  be  only  a 
fortunate  accident.  They  were  not  untiring 
students  of  versification,  forever  seeking  to  spy 
out  its  mysteries  and  to  master  its  secrets,  as 
Milton  was,  and  Tennyson  and  Poe. 

And  yet  no  critic  has  more  satisfactorily  ex- 
plained the  essential  necessity  of  avoiding  dis- 
cords than  did  Lowell  when  he  affirmed  that 
"  not  only  meter  but  even  rime  itself  is  not  with- 
out suggestion  in  outward  nature.  Look  at  the 
pine,  how  its  branches,  balancing  each  other,  ray 
out  from  the  tapering  stem  in  stanza  after  stanza, 
how  spray  answers  to  spray,  strophe  and  anti- 
strophe,  till  the  perfect  tree  stands  an  embodied 
ode,  Nature's  triumphant  vindication  of  propor- 
tion, number,  and  harmony.  Who  can  doubt 
the  innate  charm  of  rime  who  has  seen  the  blue 
river  repeat  the  blue  o'erhead;  who  has  been 
ravished  by  the  visible  consonance  of  the  tree 
263 


AN  INQUIRY   AS  TO   RIME 

growing  at  once  toward  an  upward  and  a  down- 
ward heaven  on  the  edge  of  the  twilight  cove;  or 
who  has  watched  how,  as  the  kingfisher  flitted 
from  shore  to  shore,  his  visible  echo  flies  under 
him,  and  completes  the  fleeting  couplet  in  the 
visionary  vault  below  ?  .  .  .  You  must  not  only 
expect,  but  you  must  expect  in  the  right  way; 
you  must  be  magnetized  beforehand  in  every 
fiber  by  your  own  sensibility  in  order  that  you 
may  feel  what  and  how  you  ought." 

Here  Lowell  is  in  full  agreement  with  Poe, 
who  declared  that  "  what,  in  rime,  first  and  prin- 
cipally pleases,  may  be  referred  to  the  human 
sense  or  appreciation  of  equality."  But  there  is 
no  equality  in  the  sound  of  -valleys  and  palace, 
and  so  the  human  sense  is  robbed  of  its  plea- 
sure; and  there  is  no  consonance,  visible  or 
audible,  between  woodpecker  and  bear,  and  so 
we  are  suddenly  demagnetized  by  our  own  sen- 
sibility, and  cannot  feel  what  and  how  we 
ought. 

So  long  as  the  poet  gives  us  rimes  exact  to  the 
ear  and  completely  satisfactory  to  the  sense  to 
which  they  appeal,  he  has  solid  ground  beneath 
his  feet;  but  if  once  he  leaves  this,  then  is  chaos 
come  again.  Admit  given  and  heaven,  and  it  is 
hard  to  deny  chamber  and  remember.  Having 
relinquished  the  principle  of  uniformity  of  sound, 
you  land  yourself  logically  in  the  wildest  anarchy. 
264 


AN   INQUIRY   AS   TO   RIME 

Allow  shadow  and  meadow  to  be  legitimate,  and 
how  can  you  put  the  bar  sinister  on  bear  and 
woodpecker  ?  Indeed,  we  fail  to  see  how  you 
can  help  feeling  that  John  Phoenix  was  unduly 
harsh  when  he  rejected  the  poem  of  a  Young 
Astronomer  beginning,  "  O  would  I  had  a  tele- 
scope with  fourteen  slides!"  on  account  of  the 
atrocious  attempt  in  the  second  line  to  rime 
Pleiades  with  slides. 

Lieutenant  Derby  was  a  humorist;  but  is  his 
tying  together  of  incompatible  vocables  much 
worse  than  one  offense  of  which  Keats  is  guilty  ? 

Then  who  would  go 

Into  dark  Soho, 
And  chatter  with  dack'd-haired  critics, 

When  he  can  stay 

For  the  new-mown  hay 
And  startle  the  dappled  prickets  ? 

This  quotation  is  due  to  Professor  F.  N.  Scott, 
who  has  drawn  attention  also  to  an  astounding 
quatrain  of  Tennyson's  '  Palace  of  Art ' : 

Or  in  a  clear-wall'd  city  on  the  sea, 
Near  gilded  organ-pipes,  her  hair 

Wound  with  white  roses,  slept  St.  Cecily; 
An  angel  look'd  at  ber. 

Professor  Scott  declares  that  he  hesitates  "  for 
a  term  by  which  to  characterize  such  rimes  as 
these.     Certainly  they  are  not  eye-rimes  in  the 
265 


AN   INQUIRY   AS   TO   RIME 

proper  meaning  of  that  term.  Perhaps  .  .  .  they 
may  be  called  nose-rimes." 

Just  as  every  instance  of  bad  grammar  inter- 
feres with  the  force  of  prose,  so  in  verse  every 
needless  inversion  and  every  defective  rime  in- 
terrupts the  impression  which  the  poet  wishes  to 
produce.  There  are  really  not  so  many  in  Pope's 
poems  as  there  may  seem  to  be,  for  since 
Queen  Anne's  day  our  language  has  modified  its 
pronunciation  here  and  there,  leaving  now  only 
to  the  Irish  the  tea  which  is  a  perfect  rime  to 
obey,  and  the  join  which  is  a  perfect  rime  to  line. 

Perhaps  the  prevalence  in  English  verse  of  the 
intolerable  "  allowable  rimes  "  is  due  in  part  to  an 
acceptance  of  what  seems  like  an  evil  precedent, 
to  be  explained  away  by  our  constantly  chang- 
ing pronunciation.  Perhaps  it  is  due  in  part  also 
to  the  present  wretched  orthography  of  our  lan- 
guage. The  absurd  "  rimes  to  the  eye  "  which 
abound  in  English  are  absent  from  Italian  verse 
and  from  French.  The  French,  as  the  inheritors 
through  the  Latin  of  the  great  Greek  tradition, 
have  a  finer  respect  for  form,  and  strive  con- 
stantly for  perfection  of  technic,  altho  the  ge- 
nius of  their  language  seems  to  us  far  less  lyric 
than  ours.  Theodore  de  Banville,  in  his  little 
book  on  French  versification,  declared  formally 
and  emphatically  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  a 
poetic  license.  And  Voltaire,  in  a  passage  ad- 
266 


AN   INQUIRY   AS  TO   RIME 

mirably  rendered  into  English  by  the  late  Fred- 
erick Locker-Lampson,  says  that  the  French 
"  insist  that  the  rime  shall  cost  nothing  to  the 
ideas,  that  it  shall  be  neither  trivial,  nor  too  far- 
fetched; we  exact  vigorously  in  a  verse  the  same 
purity,  the  same  precision,  as  in  prose.  We  do 
not  admit  the  smallest  license;  we  require  an 
author  to  carry  without  a  break  all  these  chains, 
yet  that  he  should  appear  ever  free." 

In  a  language  as  unrhythmic  as  the  French, 
rime  is  far  more  important  than  it  need  be  in  a 
lilting  and  musical  tongue  like  our  own;  but  in 
the  masterpieces  of  the  English  lyrists,  as  in  those 
of  the  French,  rime  plays  along  the  edges  of  a 
poem,  ever  creating  the  expectation  it  swiftly 
satisfies  and  giving  most  pleasure  when  its  pre- 
sence is  felt  and  not  flaunted.  Like  the  dress  of 
the  well-bred  woman,  which  sets  off  her  beauty 
without  attracting  attention  to  itself,  rime  must 
be  adequate  and  unobtrusive,  neither  too  fine  nor 
too  shabby,  but  always  in  perfect  taste. 
(1898-1900) 


267 


XI 

ON  THE  POETRY  OF  PLACE- 
NAMES 


ON  THE   POETRY  OF   PLACE-NAMES 


r)LUTARCH  tells  us  that  the  tragedian 

1      pus,  when  he  spoke  the  opening  lines  of 

the  '  Atreus,'  a  tragedy  by  Attius, 

I  'm  Lord  of  Argos,  heir  of  Pel  ops'  crown. 
As  far  as  Helle's  sea  and  Ion's  main 
Beat  on  the  Isthmus, 

entered  so  keenly  into  the  spirit  of  this  lofty 
passage  that  he  struck  dead  at  his  feet  a  slave 
who  approached  too  near  to  the  person  of  roy- 
alty; and  Professor  Tyrrel  notes  how  these  verses 
affect  us  with  "the  weight  of  names  great  in 
myth-land  and  hero-land,"  and  he  suggests  that 
they  produce  "a  vague  impression  of  majesty," 
like  Milton's 

Jousted  in  Aspromont  or  Montalban, 
Damasco  or  Morocco  or  Trebizond, 
Or  whom  Biserta  sent  from  Afric's  shore, 
When  Charlemagne  with  all  his  peerage  fell 
By  Fontarabia. 

It  is  a  question  how  far  the  beauty  of  the  reso- 
nant lines  of  the  '  Agamemnon  '  of  ^schylus, 
271 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

where  the  news  of  the  fall  of  Troy  is  flashed 
along  the  chain  of  beacons  from  hilltop  to  pro- 
montory, is  due  even  more  to  the  mere  sounds  of 
the  proper  names  than  it  is  to  the  memories  these 
mighty  names  evoke.  Far  inferior  to  this,  and 
yet  deriving  its  effect  also  from  the  sonorous  roll 
of  the  lordly  proper  names  (which  had  perhaps 
lingered  in  the  poet's  memory  ever  since  the 
travels  of  his  childhood),  is  the  passage  in  the 
'  Hernani '  of  Victor  Hugo,  when,  the  new  em- 
peror ordering  all  the  conspirators  to  be  set  free 
who  are  not  of  noble  blood,  the  hero  steps  for- 
ward hotly  to  declare  his  rank: 

Puisqu'il  faut  etre  grand  pour  mourir,  je  me  leve. 
Dieu  qui  donne  le  sceptre  et  qui  te  le  donna 
M'a  fait  due  de  Segorbe  et  due  de  Cardona, 
Marquis  de  Mouroy,  comte  Albatera,  vicomte 
De  Gor,  seigneur  de  lieux  dont  j 'ignore  le  compte. 
Je  suis  Jean  d'Aragon,  grand  maitre  d'Avis,  ne 
Dans  1'exil,  fils  proscrit  d'un  pere  assassine 
Par  sentence  du  tien,  roi  Carlos  de  Castille! 

Lowell,  after  telling  us  that  "  precisely  what 
makes  the  charm  of  poetry  is  what  we  cannot 
explain  any  more  than  we  can  describe  a  per- 
fume," proceeds  to  point  out  that  it  is  a  prosaic 
passage  of  Drayton's  '  Polyolbion '  which  gave  a 
hint  to  Wordsworth,  thus  finely  utilized  in  one 
of  the  later  bard's  '  Poems  on  the  Naming  of 
Places ' : 

272 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

Joanna,  looking  in  my  eyes,  beheld 
That  ravishment  of  mine,  and  laughed  aloud. 
The  Rock,  like  something  starting  from  a  sleep, 
Took  up  the  Lady's  voice,  and  laughed  again; 
The  ancient  Woman  seated  on  Helm-crag 
Was  ready  with  her  cavern;  Hammar-scar, 
And  the  tall  steep  of  Silver-how,  sent  forth 
A  noise  of  laughter;  southern  Loughrigg  heard, 
And  Fairfield  answered  with  a  mountain  tone; 
Helvellyn,  far  into  the  clear  blue  sky, 
Carried  the  Lady's  voice, —  old  Skiddaw  blew 
His  speaking-trumpet;  —  back  out  of  the  clouds 
Of  Glaramara  southward  came  the  voice; 
And  Kirkstone  tossed  it  from  his  misty  head. 

Not  a  little  of  this  same  magic  is  there  in  many 
a  line  of  Walt  Whitman;  especially  did  he  rejoice 
to  point  out  the  beauty  of  Manahatta: 

I  was  asking  something  specific  and  perfect  for  my  city, 
Whereupon  lo!  upsprang  the  aboriginal  name. 

Longfellow  has  recorded  his  feeling  that 

The  destined  walls 
Of  Cambalu  and  of  Cathain  Can 

(from  the  eleventh  book  of  '  Paradise  Lost ')  is  a 
"  delicious  line."  Longfellow  was  always  singu- 
larly sensitive  to  the  magic  power  of  words,  and 
not  long  after  that  entry  in  his  journal  there  is 
this  other:  "I  always  write  the  name  October 
with  especial  pleasure.  There  is  a  secret  charm 
about  it,  not  to  be  defined.  It  is  full  of  memo- 
273 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

ries,  it  is  full  of  dusky  splendors,  it  is  full  of 
glorious  poetry."  And  Poe  was  so  taken  with 
the  melody  of  this  same  word  that  in  '  Ulalume ' 
he  invented  a  proper  name  merely  that  he  might 
have  a  rime  for  it: 

It  was  night  in  the  lonesome  October 

Of  my  most  immemorial  year; 
It  was  hard  by  the  dim  lake  of  Auber, 

In  the  misty  mid-region  of  Weir  — 
It  was  down  by  the  dank  tarn  of  Auber, 

In  the  ghoul-haunted  woodland  of  Weir. 

The  charm  of  these  lines  is  due  mainly  to  their 
modulated  music,  and  to  the  contrast  of  the 
vowel  sounds  in  Auber  and  Weir,  just  as  a  great 
part  of  the  beauty  of  Lander's  exquisite  lyric, 
'Rose  Aylmer,'  is  contained  in  the  name  itself. 
Is  there  any  other  reason  why  Mesopotamia 
should  be  a  "  blessed  word,"  save  that  its  vowels 
and  its  consonants  are  so  combined  as  to  fill  the 
ear  with  sweetness  ?  Yet  Mr.  Lecky  records 
Garrick's  assertion  that  Whitefield  could  pro- 
nounce Mesopotamia  so  as  to  make  a  congregation 
weep.  And  others  have  found  delight  in  repeat- 
ing a  couplet  of  CampbelFs: 

And  heard  across  the  waves'  tumultuous  roar 
The  wolfs  long  howl  from  Oonalaska's  shore  — 

a  delight  due,  I  think,  chiefly  to  the  unexpected 
combination  of  open  vowels  and  sharp  conso- 

274 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

nants  in  the  single  Eskimo  word,  the  meaning  of 
it  being  unknown  and  wholly  unimportant,  and 
the  sound  of  it  filling  the  ear  with  an  uncertain 
and  yet  awaited  pleasure. 

Just  as  Oonalaska  strikes  us  at  once  as  the  fit 
title  for  a  shore  along  which  the  lone  wolf  should 
howl,  so  Atchafalaya  bears  in  its  monotonous 
vowel  a  burden  of  melancholy,  made  more  piti- 
ful to  us  by  our  knowledge  that  it  was  the  name 
of  the  dark  water  where  Evangeline  and  Gabriel 
almost  met  in  the  night  and  then  parted  again 
for  years.  Charles  Sumner  wrote  to  Longfellow 
that  Mrs.  Norton  considered  "  the  scene  on  the 
Lake  Atchafalaya,  where  the  two  lovers  pass  each 
other,  so  typical  of  life  that  she  had  a  seal  cut 
with  that  name  upon  it " ;  and  shortly  afterward 
Leopold,  the  King  of  the  Belgians,  speaking  of 
'  Evangeline,'  "  asked  her  if  she  did  not  think  the 
word  Atchafalaya  was  suggestive  of  experience 
in  life,  and  added  that  he  was  about  to  have  it 
cut  on  a  seal  "—whereupon,  to  his  astonishment, 
she  showed  him  hers. 

It  would  be  difficult  indeed  to  declare  how 
much  of  the  delight  our  ear  may  take  in  these 
words— Atchafalaya,  Oonalaska,  Mesopotamia, 
—is  due  simply  to  their  own  melody,  and  how 
much  to  the  memories  they  may  stir.  Here  we 
may  see  one  reason  why  the  past  seems  so  much 
more  romantic  than  the  present.  In  tales  of 
275 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

olden  time  even  the  proper  names  linger  in  our 
ears  with  an  echo  of  "  the  glory  that  was  Greece 
and  the  grandeur  that  was  Rome."  Here  is,  in 
fact,  an  unfair  advantage  which  dead-and-gone 
heroes  of  foreign  birth  have  over  the  men  of  our 
own  day  and  our  own  country.  "  If  we  dilate  in 
beholding  the  Greek  energy,  the  Roman  pride,  it 
is  that  we  are  already  domesticating  the  same 
sentiment,"  said  Emerson  in  his  essay  on  '  Hero- 
ism,' and  he  added  that  the  first  step  of  our 
worthiness  was  "  to  disabuse  us  of  our  supersti- 
tious associations  with  places  and  times."  And 
he  asks,  "  Why  should  these  words,  Athenian, 
Roman,  Asia,  and  England,  so  tingle  in  the  ear? 
Where  the  heart  is,  there  the  muses,  there  the 
gods  sojourn,  and  not  in  any  geography  of  fame. 
Massachusetts,  Connecticut  River,  and  Boston 
Bay  you  think  paltry  places,  and  the  ear  loves 
the  names  of  foreign  and  classic  topography. 
But  here  we  are ;  and  if  we  hurry  a  little,  we  may 
come  to  learn  that  here  is  best.  .  .  .  The  Jer- 
seys were  honest  ground  enough  for  Washing- 
ton to  tread." 

Emerson  penned  these  sentences  in  the  first 
half  of  the  nineteenth  century,  when  we  Ameri- 
cans were  still  fettered  by  the  inherited  shackles 
of  colonialism.  Fifty  years  after  he  wrote,  it 
would  have  been  hard  to  find  an  American  who 
thought  either  Boston  Bay  or  Massachusetts  a 
276 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

paltry  place.  And  Matthew  Arnold  has  recorded 
that  to  him,  when  he  was  an  undergraduate, 
Emerson  was  then  "  but  a  voice  speaking  from 
three  thousand  miles  away;  but  so  well  he  spoke 
that  from  that  time  forth  Boston  Bay  and  Con- 
cord were  names  invested  to  my  ear  with  a  sen- 
timent akin  to  that  which  invests  for  me  the 
names  of  Oxford  and  Weimar." 

As  for  the  Connecticut  River,  had  not  Thoreau 
done  it  the  service  Irving  had  rendered  long  be- 
fore to  the  Hudson  ?— had  he  not  given  it  a  right 
to  be  set  down  in  the  geography  of  literature  ? 
It  is  well  that  we  should  be  reminded  now  and 
again  that  the  map  which  the  lover  of  letters  has 
in  his  mind's  eye  is  different  by  a  whole  world 
from  the  projection  which  the  school-boy  smears 
with  his  searching  finger,  since  the  tiny  little 
rivers  on  whose  banks  great  men  grew  to  ma- 
turity, the  Tiber  and  the  Po,  the  Seine  and  the 
Thames,  flow  across  its  pages  with  a  fuller 
stream  than  any  Kongo  or  Amazon.  And  on 
this  literary  map  the  names  of  not  a  few  Ameri- 
can rivers  and  hills  and  towns  are  now  inscribed. 

It  is  fortunate  that  many  of  the  American  places 
most  likely  to  be  mentioned  in  the  poetic  gazet- 
teer have  kept  the  liquid  titles  the  aborigines 
gave  them.  "  I  climbed  one  of  my  hills  yester- 
day afternoon  and  took  a  sip  of  Wachusett,  who 
was  well  content  that  Monadnock  was  out  of  the 
277 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

way,"  wrote  Lowell  in  a  letter.  "How  lucky 
our  mountains  (many  of  them)  are  in  their  names, 
tho  they  must  find  it  hard  to  live  up  to  them 
sometimes!  The  Anglo-Saxon  sponsor  would 
Nicodemus  'em  to  nothing  in  no  time."  It  will 
be  pitiful  if  the  Anglo-Saxons  on  the  Pacific  coast 
allow  Mount  Tacoma  to  be  Nicodemused  to 
Mount  Rainier,  as  the  Anglo-Saxons  of  the  At- 
lantic coast  allowed  Lake  Andiatarocte  to  be 
Nicodemused  into  Lake  George.  Fenimore 
Cooper  strove  in  vain  for  the  acceptance  of  Hori- 
con  as  the  name  of  this  lovely  sheet  of  water, 
which  the  French  discoverer  called  the  Lake  of 
the  Holy  Sacrament. 

Marquette  spoke  of  a  certain  stream  as  the 
River  of  the  Immaculate  Conception,  altho 
the  Spaniards  were  already  familiar  with  it  as 
the  River  of  the  Holy  Spirit;  and  later  La  Salle 
called  it  after  Colbert;  but  an  Algonquin  word 
meaning  "  many  waters  "  clung  to  it  always;  and 
so  we  know  it  now  as  the  Mississippi.  The 
Spaniard  has  been  gone  from  its  banks  for  more 
than  a  hundred  years,  and  the  Frenchman  has 
followed  the  Indian,  and  the  Anglo-Saxon  now 
holds  the  mighty  river  from  its  source  to  its  many 
mouths;  but  the  broad  stream  bears  to-day  the 
name  the  red  men  gave  it.  And  so  also  the  Ohio 
keeps  its  native  name,  tho  the  French  hesi- 
tated between  St.  Louis  and  La  Belle  Riviere 
278 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

as  proper  titles  for  it.  Cataraqui  is  one  old 
name  for  an  American  river,  and  Jacques  Cartier 
accepted  for  this  stream  another  Indian  word, 
Hochelaga,  but  (as  Professor  Hinsdale  reminded 
us)  "  St.  Lawrence,  the  name  that  Cartier  had 
given  to  the  Gulf,  unfortunately  superseded  it." 

Much  of  the  charm  of  these  Indian  words, 
Atchafalaya,  Ohio,  Andiatarocte,  Tacoma,  is  due 
no  doubt  to  their  open  vowels;  but  is  not  some 
of  it  to  be  ascribed  to  our  ignorance  of  their 
meanings  ?  We  may  chance  to  know  that  Mis- 
sissippi signifies  "  many  waters  "  and  that  Min- 
nehaha  can  be  interpreted  as  "laughing  water," 
but  that  is  the  furthermost  border  of  our  know- 
ledge. If  we  were  all  familiar  with  the  Algon- 
quin dialects,  I  fancy  that  the  fascination  of  many 
of  these  names  would  fade  swiftly.  And  yet 
perhaps  it  would  not,  for  we  could  never  be  on 
as  friendly  terms  with  the  Indian  language  as  we 
are  with  our  own;  and  there  is  ever  a  suggestion 
of  the  mystic  in  the  foreign  tongue. 

We  engrave  Souvenir  on  our  sweetheart's 
bracelet  or  brooch ;  but  the  French  for  this  pur- 
pose prefer  Remember.  "  The  difficulty  of  trans- 
lation lies  in  the  color  of  words,"  Longfellow 
declared.  "  Is  the  Italian  ruscilletto  gorgoglioso 
fully  rendered  by  gurgling  brooklet?  Or  the 
Spanish  pajaros  'vocingleros  by  garrulous  birds  ? 
Something  seems  wanting.  Perhaps  it  is  only 
279 


ON  THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

the  fascination  of  foreign  and  unfamiliar  sounds; 
and  to  the  Italian  and  Spanish  ear  the  English 
words  may  seem  equally  beautiful." 

After  the  death  of  the  Duke  of  Wellington, 
Longfellow  wrote  a  poem  on  the  '  Warden  of 
the  Cinque  Ports ' ;  and  to  us  Americans  there  was 
poetry  in  the  very  title.  And  yet  it  may  be 
questioned  whether  the  Five  Ports  are  necessarily 
any  more  poetic  than  the  Five  Points  or  the 
Seven  Dials.  So  also  Sanguelac  strikes  us  as  far 
loftier  than  Bloody  Pond,  but  is  it  really  ?  I  have 
wondered  often  whether  to  a  Jew  of  the  first 
century  Aceldama,  the  field  of  blood,  and  Golgo- 
tha, the  place  of  a  skull,  were  not  perfectly  com- 
monplace designations,  quite  as  common,  in  fact, 
as  Bone  Gulch  or  Hangman's  Hollow  would  be 
to  us,  and  conveying  the  same  kind  of  suggestion. 

We  are  always  prone  to  accept  the  unknown 
as  the  magnificent,— if  I  may  translate  the  Latin 
phrase, —to  put  a  higher  value  on  the  things  veiled 
from  us  by  the  folds  of  a  foreign  language.  The 
Bosporus  is  a  more  poetic  place  than  Oxford, 
tho  the  meaning  of  both  names  is  the  same. 
Montenegro  fills  our  ears  and  raises  our  expecta- 
tions higher  than  could  any  mere  Black  Mountain. 
The  "Big  River"  is  but  a  vulgar  nickname,  and 
yet  we  accept  the  equivalent  Guadalquivir  and 
Rio  Grande;  we  even  allow  ourselves  sometimes 
to  speak  of  the  Rio  Grande  River— which  is  as 
280 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

tautological  as  De  Quincey  declared  the  name  of 
Mrs.  Barbauld  to  be.  Bridgeport  is  as  prosaic 
as  may  be,  while  Alcantara  has  a  remote  and 
romantic  aroma,  and  yet  the  latter  word  signifies 
only  "the  bridge."  We  can  be  neighborly, 
most  of  us,  with  the  White  Mountains;  but  we 
feel  a  deeper  respect  for  Mont  Blanc  and  the 
Weisshorn  and  the  Sierra  Nevada. 

Sometimes  the  hard  facts  are  twisted  arbitrarily 
to  force  them  into  an  imported  falsehood.  El- 
beron,  where  Garfield  died,  was  founded  by  one 
L.  B.  Brown,  so  they  say,  and  the  homely  name 
of  the  owner  was  thus  contorted  to  make  a  seem- 
ingly exotic  appellation  for  the  place.  And  they 
say  also  that  the  man  who  once  dammed  a  brook 
amid  the  pines  of  New  Jersey  had  three  children, 
Carrie,  Sally,  and  Joe,  and  that  he  bestowed  their 
united  names  upon  Lake  Carasaljo,  the  artificial 
piece  of  water  on  the  banks  of  which  Lakewood 
now  sits  salubriously.  In  Mr.  Cable's  'John 
March,  Southerner,'  one  of  the  characters  ex- 
plains: "You  know  an  ancestor  of  his  founded 
Suez.  That 's  how  it  got  its  name.  His  name 
was  Ezra  and  hers  was  Susan,  don't  you  see  ?  " 
And  I  have  been  told  of  a  town  on  the  Northern 
Pacific  Railroad  which  the  first  comers  called 
Hell-to-Pay,  and  which  has  since  experienced  a 
change  of  heart  and  become  Eltopia. 

In  the  third  quarter  of  the  nineteenth  century  a 
281 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

thirst  for  self-improvement  raged  among  the  vil- 
lages of  the  lower  Hudson  River,  and  many  a 
modest  settlement  thought  to  better  itself  and  to 
rise  in  the  world  by  the  assumption  of  a  more 
swelling  style  and  title.  When  a  proposition  was 
made  to  give  up  the  homely  Dobbs  Ferry  for 
something  less  plebeian,  the  poet  of  '  Nothing  to 
Wear'  rimed  a  pungent  protest: 

They  say  "  Dobbs  "  ain't  melodious; 
It 's  "  horrid,"  "  vulgar,"  "  odious"; 

In  all  their  crops  it  sticks; 
And  then  the  worse  addendum 
Of  "  Ferry  "  does  offend  'em 

More  than  its  vile  prefix. 
Well,  it  does  seem  distressing, 
But,  if  1  'm  good  at  guessing, 

Each  one  of  these  same  nobs 
If  there  was  money  in  it, 
Would  ferry  in  a  minute, 

And  change  his  name  to  Dobbs! 

That  's  it— they  're  not  partic'lar 
Respecting  the  auric'lar 

At  a  stiff  market  rate; 
But  Dobbs's  special  vice  is 
That  he  keeps  down  the  prices 

Of  all  their  real  estate! 
A  name  so  unattractive 
Keeps  villa-sites  inactive, 

And  spoils  the  broker's  jobs; 
They  think  that  speculation 
Would  rage  at  "  Paulding's  Station," 

Which  stagnates  now  at  "  Dobbs." 
282 


ON   THE   POETRY    OF   PLACE-NAMES 

In    the    later    stanzas    Mr.    Butler    denounces 
changes  nearer  to  New  York : 

Down  there,  on  old  Manhattan, 
Where  land-sharks  breed  and  fatten, 

They  wiped  out  Tubby  Hook. 
That  famous  promontory, 
Renowned  in  song  and  story, 

Which  time  nor  tempest  shook, 
Whose  name  for  aye  had  been  good, 
Stands  newly  christened  "  Inwood," 

And  branded  with  the  shame 
Of  some  old  rogue  who  passes 
By  dint  of  aliases, 

Afraid  of  his  own  name! 

See  how  they  quite  outrival 
Plain  barn-yard  Spuyten  Duyvil 

By  peacock  Riverdale, 
Which  thinks  all  else  it  conquers, 
And  over  homespun  Yonkers 

Spreads  out  its  flaunting  tail! 

No  loyal  Manhattaner  but  would  regret  to  part 
with  Spuyten  Duyvil  and  Yonkers  and  Harlem, 
and  the  other  good  old  names  that  recall  the  good 
old  Dutchmen  who  founded  New  Amsterdam. 
Few  loyal  Manhattaners,  I  think,  but  would  be 
glad  to  see  the  Greater  New  York  (now  at  last 
an  accomplished  fact)  dignified  by  a  name  less 
absurd  than  New  York.  If  Pesth  and  Buda  could 
come  together  and  become  Budapest,  why  may 
not  the  Greater  New  York  resume  the  earlier 
283 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

name  and  be  known  to  the  world  as  Manhattan  ? 
Why  should  the  people  of  this  great  city  of  ours 
let  the  Anglo-Saxons  "  Nicodemus  us  to  nothing," 
or  less  than  nothing,  with  a  name  so  pitiful  as 
New  York?  "I  hope  and  trust,"  wrote  Wash- 
ington Irving,  "  that  we  are  to  live  to  be  an  old 
nation,  as  well  as  our  neighbors,  and  have  no 
idea  that  our  cities  when  they  shall  have  attained 
to  venerable  antiquity  shall  still  be  dubbed  New 
York  and  New  London  and  new  this  and  new 
that,  like  the  Pont  Neuf  (the  new  bridge)  at  Paris, 
which  is  the  oldest  bridge  in  that  capital,  or  like 
the  Vicar  of  Wakefield's  horse,  which  continued 
to  be  called  the  colt  until  he  died  of  old  age." 

Whenever  any  change  shall  be  made  we  must 
hope  that  the  new  will  be  not  only  more  eupho- 
nious than  the  old,  but  more  appropriate  and 
more  stately.  Perhaps  Hangtown  in  California 
made  a  change  for  the  better  many  years  ago 
when  it  took  the  name  of  Placerville;  but  per- 
haps Placerville  was  not  the  best  name  it  could 
have  taken.  "  We  will  be  nothing  but  Anglo- 
Saxons  in  the  old  world  or  in  the  new,"  wrote 
Matthew  Arnold  when  he  was  declaring  the 
beauty  of  Celtic  literature ;  "  and  when  our  race 
has  built  Bold  Street  in  Liverpool,  and  pro- 
nounced it  very  good,  it  hurries  across  the  Atlan- 
tic, and  builds  Nashville  and  Jacksonville  and 
Milledgeville,  and  thinks  it  is  fulfilling  the  designs 
284 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

of  Providence  in  an  incomparable  manner."  In 
this  sentence  the  criticism  cuts  both  British  habits 
and  American.  Later  in  life  Matthew  Arnold 
sharpened  his  knife  again  for  use  on  the  United 
States  alone.  "What  people,"  he  asked,  "in 
whom  the  sense  for  beauty  and  fitness  was 
quick,  could  have  invented  or  tolerated  the  hide- 
ous names  ending  in  ville  —  the  Briggsvilles, 
Higginsvilles,  Jacksonvilles— rife  from  Maine  to 
Florida  ?  " 

Now,  it  must  be  confessed  at  once  that  we 
have  no  guard  against  a  thrust  like  that.  Such 
names  do  abound  and  they  are  of  unsurpassed 
hideousness.  But  could  not  the  same  blow  have 
got  home  as  fatally  had  it  been  directed  against 
his  own  country  ?  A  glance  at  any  gazetteer  of 
the  British  Isles  would  show  that  the  British  are 
quite  as  vulnerable  as  the  Americans.  In  fact, 
this  very  question  of  Matthew  Arnold's  sug- 
gested to  an  anonymous  American  rimester  the 
perpetration  of  a  copy  of  verses,  the  quality  of 
which  can  be  gaged  by  these  first  three  stanzas : 

Of  Briggsville  and  Jacksonville 

I  care  not  now  to  sing; 
They  make  me  sad  and  very  mad — 

My  inmost  soul  they  wring. 
I  '11  hie  me  back  to  England, 

And  straightway  I  will  go 
To  Boxford  and  to  Swaffham, 

To  Plunger  and  Loose  Hoe. 
285 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

At  Scrooby  and  at  Gonerby, 

At  Wigton  and  at  Smeeth, 
At  Bottesford  and  Runcorn, 

I  need  not  grit  my  teeth. 
At  Swineshead  and  at  Crummock, 

At  Sibsey  and  Spithead, 
Stoke  Poges  and  Wolsoken 

I  will  not  wish  me  dead. 

At  Horbling  and  at  Skidby, 

At  Chipping  Ongar,  too, 
At  Botterel  Stotterdon  and  Swops, 

At  Skellington  and  Skew, 
At  Piddletown  and  Blumsdown, 

At  Shanklin  and  at  Smart, 
At  Gosberton  and  Wrangle 

I  '11  soothe  this  aching  heart. 

To  discover  a  mote  in  our  neighbor's  eyes  does 
not  remove  the  mote  in  our  own,  however  much 
immediate  relief  it  may  give  us  from  the  acute- 
ness  of  our  pain.  When  Matthew  Arnold  ani- 
madverted upon  "  the  jumbles  of  unnatural  and 
inappropriate  names  everywhere,"  he  may  have 
had  in  mind  the  most  absurd  medley  existing 
anywhere  in  the  world— the  handful  of  Greek 
and  Roman  names  of  all  sorts  which  was  sown 
broadcast  over  the  western  part  of  New  York 
State.  Probably  this  region  of  misfortune  it  was 
that  Irving  was  thinking  about  when  he  de- 
nounced the  "  shallow  affectation  of  scholarship," 
and  told  how  "the  whole  catalog  of  ancient 
286 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

worthies  is  shaken  out  of  the  back  of  Lempriere's 
Classical  Dictionary,  and  a  wide  region  of  wild 
country  is  sprinkled  over  with  the  names  of 
heroes,  poets,  sages  of  antiquity,  jumbled  into 
the  most  whimsical  juxtaposition." 

Along  the  road  from  Dublin,  going  south  to 
Bray,  the  traveler  finds  Dumdrum  and  Stillor- 
gan,  as  tho— to  quote  the  remarks  of  the  Irish 
friend  who  gave  me  these  facts— a  band  of 
wandering  musicians  had  broken  up  and  scat- 
tered their  names  along  the  highway.  For  sheer 
ugliness  it  would  be  hard  to  beat  two  other 
proper  names  near  Dublin,  where  the  Sallynoggin 
road  runs  into  the  Glenageary. 

It  may  be  that  these  words  sound  harsher  in 
our  strange  ears  than  they  do  to  a  native  wonted 
to  their  use.  We  take  the  unknown  for  the 
magnificent  sometimes,  no  doubt;  but  sometimes 
also  we  take  it  for  the  ridiculous.  To  us  New- 
Yorkers,  for  instance,  there  is  nothing  absurd  or 
ludicrous  in  the  sturdy  name  of  Schenectady; 
perhaps  there  is  even  a  hint  of  stateliness  in  the 
syllables.  But  when  Mr.  Laurence  Hutton  was 
in  the  north  of  Scotland  some  years  ago  there 
happened  to  be  in  his  party  a  young  lady  from 
that  old  Dutch  town;  and  when  a  certain  laird 
who  lived  in  those  parts  chanced  to  be  told  that 
this  young  lady  dwelt  in  Schenectady  he  was 
moved  to  inextinguishable  laughter.  He  ejacu- 
287 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

lated  the  outlandish  sounds  again  and  again  in 
the  sparse  intervals  of  his  boisterous  merriment. 
He  announced  to  all  his  neighbors  that  among 
their  visitors  was  a  young  lady  from  Schenectady, 
and  all  who  called  were  presented  to  her,  and  at 
every  repetition  of  the  strange  syllables  his  vio- 
lent cachinnations  broke  forth  afresh.  Never  had 
so  comic  a  name  fallen  upon  his  ears ;  and  yet  he 
himself  was  the  laird  of  Balduthro  (pronounced 
Balduthy) ;  his  parish  was  Ironcross  (pronounced 
Aron-crouch) ;  his  railway-station  was  Kilcon- 
quhar  (pronounced  Kinocher) ;  and  his  post-office 
was  Pittenweem! 

Robert  Louis  Stevenson  was  a  Scotchman  who 
had  changed  his  point  of  view  more  often  than 
the  laird  of  Balduthro;  he  had  a  broader  vision 
and  a  more  delicate  ear  and  a  more  refined  per- 
ception of  humor.  When  he  came  to  these 
United  States  as  an  amateur  immigrant  on  his 
way  across  the  plains,  he  asked  the  name  of  a 
river  from  a  brakeman  on  the  train;  and  when  he 
heard  that  the  stream  "  was  called  the  Susque- 
hanna,  the  beauty  of  the  name  seemed  part  and 
parcel  of  the  beauty  of  the  land.  As  when  Adam 
with  divine  fitness  named  the  creatures,  so  this 
word  Susquehanna  was  at  once  accepted  by  the 
fancy.  That  was  the  name,  as  no  other  could 
be,  for  that  shining  river  and  desirable  valley." 

And  then  Stevenson  breaks  from  his  narrative 
288 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

to  sing  the  praises  of  our  place-names.  The 
passage  is  long  for  quotation  in  a  paper  where 
too  much  has  been  quoted  already;  and  yet  I 
should  be  derelict  to  my  duty  if  I  did  not  tran- 
scribe it  here.  Stevenson  had  lived  among  many 
peoples,  and  he  was  far  more  cosmopolitan  than 
Matthew  Arnold,  and  more  willing,  therefore,  to 
dwell  on  beauties  than  on  blemishes.  "None 
can  care  for  literature  in  itself,"  he  begins,  "  who 
do  not  take  a  special  pleasure  in  the  sound  of 
names;  and  there  is  no  part  of  the  world  where 
nomenclature  is  so  rich,  poetical,  humorous,  and 
picturesque  as  the  United  States  of  America. 
All  times,  races,  and  languages  have  brought 
their  contribution.  Pekin  is  in  the  same  State 
with  Euclid,  with  Bellefontaine,  and  with  San- 
dusky.  Chelsea,  with  its  London  associations  of 
red  brick,  Sloane  Square,  and  the  King's  Road,  is 
own  suburb  to  stately  and  primeval  Memphis; 
there  they  have  their  seat,  translated  names  of 
cities,  where  the  Mississippi  runs  by  Tennessee 
and  Arkansas.  .  .  .  Old,  red  Manhattan  lies, 
like  an  Indian  arrow-head  under  a  steam-factory, 
below  Anglified  New  York.  The  names  of  the 
States  and  Territories  themselves  form  a  chorus 
of  sweet  and  most  romantic  vocables:  Delaware, 
Ohio,  Indiana,  Florida,  Dakota,  Iowa,  Wyoming, 
Minnesota,  and  the  Carolinas;  there  are  few 
poems  with  a  nobler  music  for  the  ear;  a  song- 
289 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

ful,  tuneful  land;  and  if  the  new  Homer  shall 
arise  from  the  western  continent,  his  verse  will 
be  enriched,  his  pages  sing  spontaneously,  with 
the  names  of  states  and  cities  that  would  strike 
the  fancy  in  a  business  circular." 

As  Campbell  had  utilized  the  innate  beauty  of 
the  word  Wyoming,  so  Stevenson  himself  made 
a  ballad  on  the  dreaded  name  of  Ticonderoga; 
and  these  are  two  of  the  proper  names  of  mod- 
ern America  that  sing  themselves.  But  there  is 
nothing  canorous  in  Anglified  New  York;  there 
is  no  sonority  in  its  syllables;  there  is  neither 
dignity  nor  truth  in  its  obvious  meaning.  It 
might  serve  well  enough  as  the  address  of  a 
steam-factory  in  a  business  circular;  but  it  lacks 
absolutely  all  that  the  name  of  a  metropolis  de- 
mands. Stevenson  thought  that  the  new  Homer 
would  joy  in  working  into  his  strong  lines  the 
beautiful  nomenclature  of  America;  but  Wash- 
ington Irving  had  the  same  anticipation,  and  it 
forced  him  to  declare  that  if  New  York  "  were  to 
share  the  fate  of  Troy  itself,  to  suffer  a  ten  years' 
siege,  and  be  sacked  and  plundered,  no  modern 
Homer  would  ever  be  able  to  elevate  the  name 
to  epic  dignity."  Irving  went  so  far  as  to  wish 
not  only  that  New  York  city  should  be  Manhat- 
tan again,  but  that  New  York  State  should  be 
Ontario,  the  Hudson  River  the  Mohegan,  and  the 
United  States  themselves  Appalachia.  Edgar 
290 


ON   THE   POETRY   OF   PLACE-NAMES 

Allan  Poe,  than  whom  none  of  our  poets  had  a 
keener  perception  of  the  beauty  of  sounds  and 
the  fitness  of  words,  approved  of  Appalachia  as 
the  name  of  the  whole  country. 

Perhaps  we  must  wait  yet  a  little  while  for 

Appalachia  and  Ontario  and  the  Mohegan;  but 

has  not  the  time  come  to  dig  up  that  old  red 

arrow-head  Manhattan,  and  fit  it  to  a  new  shaft  ? 

('895) 


291 


XII 
AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING" 


[This  paper  is  here  reprinted  from  an  earlier  volume  now  out 
of  print.] 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING" 

WHEN  the  author  of  the  'Cathedral'  was 
accosted  by  the  wandering  Englishmen 
within  the  lofty  aisles  of  Chartres,  he  cracked  a 
joke, 

Whereat  they  stared,  then  laughed,  and  we  were  friends. 
The  seas,  the  wars,  the  centuries  interposed, 
Abolished  in  the  truce  of  common  speech 
And  mutual  comfort  of  the  mother-tongue. 

In  this  common  speech  other  Englishmen  are 
not  always  ready  to  acknowledge  the  full  rights 
of  Lowell's  countrymen.  They  would  put  us 
ofT  with  but  a  younger  brother's  portion  of  the 
mother-tongue,  seeming  somehow  to  think  that 
they  are  more  closely  related  to  the  common 
parent  than  we  are.  But  Orlando,  the  younger 
son  of  Sir  Rowland  du  Bois,  was  no  villain;  and 
tho  we  have  broken  with  the  fatherland,  the 
mother-tongue  is  none  the  less  our  heritage. 
Indeed,  we  need  not  care  whether  the  division  is 
per  stirpes  or  per  capita  ;  our  share  is  not  the  less 
in  either  case. 

295 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING" 

Beneath  the  impotent  protests  which  certain 
British  newspapers  are  prone  to  make  every 
now  and  again  against  the  "American  language  " 
as  a  whole,  and  against  the  stray  Americanism 
which  has  happened  last  to  invade  England,  there 
is  a  tacit  assumption  that  we  Americans  are  outer 
barbarians,  mere  strangers,  wickedly  tampering 
with  something  which  belongs  to  the  British 
exclusively.  And  the  outcry  against  the  "  Ameri- 
can language  "  is  not  as  shrill  nor  as  piteous  as 
the  shriek  of  horror  with  which  certain  of  the 
journals  of  London  greet  "American  spelling,"  a 
hideous  monster  which  they  feared  was  ready  to 
devour  them  as  soon  as  the  international  copyright 
bill  should  become  law.  In  the  midst  of  every  dis- 
cussion of  the  effect  of  the  copyright  act  in  Great 
Britain,  the  bugbear  of  "American  spelling" 
reared  its  grisly  head.  The  London  Times  de- 
clared that  English  publishers  would  never  put 
any  books  into  type  in  the  United  States  because 
the  people  of  England  would  never  tolerate  the 
peculiarities  of  orthography  which  prevailed  in 
American  printing-offices.  The  St.  James's  Ga- 
^ette  promptly  retorted  that  "already  newspapers 
in  London  are  habitually  using  the  ugliest  forms 
of  American  spelling,  and  these  silly  eccentricities 
do  not  make  the  slightest  difference  in  their  cir- 
culation." The  Times  and  the  St.  James's  Gazette 
might  differ  as  to  the  effect  of  the  copyright  act 
296 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING" 

on  the  profits  of  the  printers  of  England,  but 
they  agreed  heartily  as  to  the  total  depravity  of 
"American  spelling."  I  think  that  any  disinte- 
rested foreigner  who  might  chance  to  hear  these 
violent  outcries  would  suppose  that  English 
orthography  was  as  the  law  of  the  Medes  and 
Persians,  which  altereth  not;  he  would  be  justi- 
fied in  believing  that  the  system  of  spelling  now 
in  use  in  Great  Britain  was  hallowed  by  the 
Established  Church,  and  in  some  way  mysteri- 
ously connected  with  the  state  religion. 

Just  what  the  British  newspapers  were  afraid  of 
it  is  not  easy  to  say,  and  it  is  difficult  to  declare 
just  what  they  mean  when  they  talk  of  "Ameri- 
can spelling."  Probably  they  do  not  refer  to  the 
improvements  in  orthography  suggested  by  the 
first  great  American  —  Benjamin  Franklin.  Pos- 
sibly they  do  refer  to  the  modifications  in  the 
accepted  spelling  proposed  by  another  American, 
Noah  Webster  —  not  so  great,  and  yet  not  to  be 
named  slightingly  by  any  one  who  knows  how 
fertile  his  labors  have  been  for  the  good  of  the 
whole  country.  Noah  Webster,  so  his  bio- 
grapher, Mr.  Scudder,  tells  us,  "was  one  of  the 
first  to  carry  a  spirit  of  democracy  into  letters.  .  .  . 
Throughout  his  work  one  may  detect  a  confi- 
dence in  the  common  sense  of  the  people  which 
was  as  firm  as  Franklin's."  But  the  innovations 
of  Webster  were  hesitating  and  often  inconsistent; 
297 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING 

and  most  of  them  have  been  abandoned  by  later 
editors  of  Webster's  American  Dictionary  of  the 
English  Language. 

What,  then,  do  British  writers  mean  when 
they  animadvert  upon  "American  spelling"? 
So  far  as  I  have  been  able  to  discover,  the  British 
journalists  object  to  certain  minor  labor-saving 
improvements  of  American  orthography,  such  as 
the  dropping  of  the  h  from  almanack,  the  omis- 
sion of  one  g  from  waggon,  and  the  like;  and 
they  protest  with  double  force,  with  all  the 
strength  that  in  them  lies,  against  the  substitu- 
tion of  a  single  /  for  a  double  /  in  such  words  as 
traveller,  against  the  omission  of  the  u  from  such 
words  as  honour,  against  the  substitution  of  an 
s  for  a  c  in  such  words  as  defence,  and  against 
the  transposing  of  the  final  two  letters  of  such 
words  as  theatre.  The  objection  to  "American 
spelling"  may  lie  deeper  than  I  have  here  sug- 
gested, and  it  may  have  a  wider  application ;  but 
I  have  done  my  best  to  state  it  fully  and  fairly  as 
I  have  deduced  it  from  a  painful  perusal  of  many 
columns  of  exacerbated  British  writing. 

Now  if  I  have  succeeded  in  stating  honestly 
the  extent  of  the  British  journalistic  objections  to 
"American  spelling,"  the  unprejudiced  reader 
may  be  moved  to  ask:  "Is  this  all  ?  Are  these 
few  and  slight  and  unimportant  changes  the 
cause  of  this  mighty  commotion?"  One  may 
298 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING 

agree  with  Sainte-Beuve  in  thinking  that  "or- 
thography is  the  beginning  of  literature,"  with- 
out discovering  in  these  modifications  from  the 
Johnsonian  canon  any  cause  for  extreme  disgust. 
And  since  I  have  quoted  Sainte-Beuve  once,  I 
venture  to  cite  him  again,  and  to  take  from  the 
same  letter  of  March  15,  1867,  his  suggestion 
that  "if  we  write  more  correctly,  let  it  be  to  ex- 
press especiallyhonest  feelings  and  just  thoughts." 

Feelings  may  be  honest  tho  they  are  violent, 
but  irritation  is  not  the  best  frame  of  mind  for 
just  thinking.  The  tenacity  with  which  some  of 
the  newspapers  of  London  are  wont  to  defend 
the  accepted  British  orthography  is  perhaps  due 
rather  to  feeling  than  to  thought.  Lowell  told 
us  that  esthetic  hatred  burned  nowadays  with 
as  fierce  a  flame  as  ever  once  theological  hatred; 
and  any  American  who  chances  to  note  the  force 
and  the  fervor  and  the  frequency  of  the  objurga- 
tions against  "  American  spelling  "  in  the  columns 
of  the  Saturday  Review,  for  example,  and  of  the 
Athenceum,  may  find  himself  wondering  as  to 
the  date  of  the  papal  bull  which  declared  the  in- 
fallibility of  contemporary  British  orthography, 
and  as  to  the  place  where  the  council  of  the 
church  was  held  at  which  it  was  made  an  article 
of  faith. 

The    Saturday  Review   and   the   Atbenceum, 
highly  pitched  as  their  voices  are,  yet  are  scarcely 
299 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING 

shriller  in  their  cry  to  arms  against  the  possible 
invasion  of  the  sanctity  of  British  orthography 
by  "American  spelling"  than  is  the  London 
Times,  the  solid  representative  of  British  thought, 
the  mighty  organ-voice  of  British  feeling.  Yet 
the  Times  is  not  without  orthographic  eccentrici- 
ties of  its  own,  as  Matthew  Arnold  took  occa- 
sion to  point  out.  In  his  essay  on  the  '  Literary 
Influence  of  Academies,'  he  asserted  that  "every 
one  has  noticed  the  way  in  which  the  Times 
chooses  to  spell  the  word  diocese;  it  always 
spells  it  diocess,  deriving  it,  I  suppose,  from 
Zeus  and  census.  .  .  .  Imagine  an  educated 
Frenchman  indulging  himself  in  an  orthographi- 
cal antic  of  this  sort!" 

When  we  read  what  is  written  in  the  Times 
and  the  Saturday  Review  and  the  Athenceum, 
sometimes  in  set  articles  on  the  subject,  and 
even  more  often  in  casual  and  subsidiary  slurs 
in  the  course  of  book-reviews,  we  wonder  at 
the  vehemence  of  the  feeling  displayed.  If  we 
did  not  know  that  ancient  abuses  are  often  de- 
fended with  more  violence  and  with  louder  shouts 
than  inheritances  of  less  doubtful  worth,  we 
might  suppose  that  the  present  spelling  of  the 
English  language  was  in  a  condition  perfectly 
satisfactory  alike  to  scholar  and  to  student. 
Such,  however,  is  not  the  case.  The  leading 
philologists  of  Great  Britain  and  of  the  United 
300 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING 

States  have  repeatedly  denounced  English  spell- 
ing as  it  now  is  on  both  sides  of  the  Atlantic, 
Professor  Max  Muller  at  Oxford  being  no  less  em- 
phatic than  Professor  Whitney  at  Yale.  There 
is  now  living  no  scholar  of  any  repute  who  any 
longer  defends  the  ordinary  orthography  of  the 
English  language. 

The  fact  is  that  a  little  learning  is  quite  as  dan- 
gerous a  thing  now  as  it  was  in  Pope's  day. 
Those  who  are  volubly  denouncing  "American 
spelling  "  in  the  columns  of  British  journals  are 
not  students  of  the  history  of  English  speech; 
they  are  not  scholars  in  English ;  in  so  far  as  they 
know  anything  of  the  language,  they  are  but 
amateur  philologists.  As  a  well-known  writer 
on  spelling  reform  once  neatly  remarked,  "The 
men  who  get  their  etymology  by  inspiration  are 
like  the  poor  in  that  we  have  them  always  with 
us."  Altho  few  of  them  are  as  ignorant  and 
dense  as  the  unknown  unfortunate  who  first  tor- 
tured the  obviously  jocular  Welsh  rabbit  into  a 
ridiculously  impossible  Welsh  rarebit,  still  the 
most  of  their  writing  serves  no  good  purpose. 
Nor  do  we  discover  in  these  specimens  of  British 
journalism  that  abundant  urbanity  which  ety- 
mology might  lead  us  to  look  for  in  the  writing 
of  inhabitants  of  so  large  a  city  as  London. 

Any  one  who  takes  the  trouble  to  inform  him- 
self on  the  subject  will  soon  discover  that  it  is 
301 


AS   TO    "AMERICAN   SPELLING" 

chiefly  the  half-educated  men  who  defend  the  con- 
temporary orthography  of  the  English  language, 
and  who  denounce  the  alleged  "American  spell- 
ing" of  center  and  honor.  The  uneducated 
reader  may  wonder  perchance  what  the  g  is 
doing  in  sovereign;  the  half-educated  reader  dis- 
cerns in  the  g  a  connecting-link  between  the 
English  sovereign  and  the  Latin  regno;  the  well- 
educated  reader  knows  that  there  is  no  philolo- 
gical connection  whatever  between  regno  and 
sovereign. 

Most  of  those  who  write  with  ease  in  British 
journals,  deploring  the  prevalence  of  "American 
spelling,"  have  never  carried  their  education  so 
far  as  to  acquire  that  foundation  of  wisdom  which 
prevents  a  man  from  expressing  an  opinion  on 
subjects  as  to  which  he  is  ignorant.  The  object 
of  education,  it  has  been  said,  is  to  make  a  man 
know  what  he  knows,  and  also  to  know  how 
much  he  does  not  know.  Despite  the  close 
sympathy  between  the  intellectual  pursuits,  a 
student  of  optics  is  not  necessarily  qualified  to 
express  an  opinion  in  esthetics;  and  on  the  other 
hand,  a  critic  of  art  may  easily  be  ignorant  of 
science.  Now  literature  is  one  of  the  arts,  and 
philology  is  a  science.  Altho  men  of  letters 
have  to  use  words  as  the  tools  of  their  trade, 
orthography  is  none  the  less  a  branch  of  philology, 
and  philology  does  not  come  by  nature.  Litera- 
302 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING 

ture  may  even  exist  without  writing,  and  there- 
fore without  spelling.  Writing,  indeed,  has 
no  necessary  connection  with  literature;  still  less 
has  orthography.  A  literary  critic  is  rarely  a 
scientific  student  of  language;  he  has  no  need  to 
be;  but  being  ignorant,  it  is  the  part  of  modesty 
for  him  not  to  expose  his  ignorance.  To  boast 
of  it  is  unseemly. 

Far  be  it  from  me  to  appear  as  the  defender  of 
the  "American  spelling"  which  the  British  jour- 
nalists denounce.  This  "American  spelling"  is 
less  absurd  than  the  British  spelling  only  in  so 
far  as  it  has  varied  therefrom.  Even  in  these 
variations  there  is  abundant  absurdity.  Once 
upon  a  time  most  words  that  now  are  spelled 
with  a  final  c  had  an  added  k.  Even  now  both 
British  and  American  usage  retains  this  k  in  ham- 
mock, altho  both  British  and  Americans  have 
dropped  the  needless  letter  from  bavoc;  while  the 
British  retain  the  k  at  the  end  of  almanack  and 
the  Americans  have  dropped  it.  Dr.  Johnson 
was  a  reactionary  in  orthography  as  in  politics; 
and  in  his  dictionary  he  wilfully  put  a  final  k 
to  words  like  optick,  without  being  generally 
followed  by  the  publick  —  as  he  would  have 
spelled  it.  Music  was  then  musick,  altho,  even 
as  late  as  Aubrey's  time,  it  had  been  musique. 
In  our  own  day  we  are  witnessing  the  very 
gradual  substitution  of  the  logical  technic  for 
303 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING 

the  form  originally  imported  from  France  — 
technique. 

I  am  inclined  to  think  that  technic  is  replacing 
technique  more  rapidly  —  or  should  I  say  less 
slowly? — in  the  United  States  than  in  Great 
Britain.  We  Americans  like  to  assimilate  our 
words  and  to  make  them  our  own,  while  the 
British  have  rather  a  fondness  for  foreign  phrases. 
A  London  journalist  recently  held  up  to  public 
obloquy  as  an  "ignorant  Americanism"  the 
word  program,  altho  he  would  have  found  it 
set  down  in  Professor  Skeat's  Etymological 
Dictionary.  "Programme  was  taken  from  the 
French,"  so  a  recent  writer  reminds  us,  "and  in 
violation  of  analogy,  seeing  that,  when  it  was 
imported  into  English,  we  had  already  anagram, 
cryptogram,  diagram,  epigram,  etc."  The  logical 
form  program  is  not  common  even  in  America; 
and  British  writers  seem  to  prefer  the  French 
form,  as  British  speakers  still  give  a  French  pro- 
nunciation to  charade,  and  to  trait,  which  in 
America  have  long  since  been  accepted  frankly  as 
English  words. 

Possibly  it  is  idle  to  look  for  any  logic  in  any- 
thing which  has  to  do  with  modern  English 
orthography  on  either  side  of  the  ocean.  Per- 
haps, however,  there  is  less  even  than  ordinary 
logic  in  the  British  journalist's  objection  to  the 
so-called  "American  spelling  "  of  meter  ;  for  why 
304 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING" 

should  any  one  insist  on  metre  while  unhesitatingly 
accepting  its  compound  diameter?  Mr.  John 
Bellows,  in  the  preface  to  his  inestimable  French- 
English  and  English-French  pocket  dictionary, 
one  of  the  very  best  books  of  reference  ever  pub- 
lished, informs  us  that  "the  act  of  Parliament 
legalizing  the  use  of  the  metric  system  in  this 
country  [England]  gives  the  words  meter,  liter, 
gram,  etc.,  spelled  on  the  American  plan."  Per- 
haps now  that  the  sanction  of  law  has  been  given 
to  this  spelling,  the  final  er  will  drive  out  the  re 
which  has  usurped  its  place.  In  one  of  the  last 
papers  that  he  wrote,  Lowell  declared  that  "cen- 
ter is  no  Americanism;  it  entered  the  language 
in  that  shape,  and  kept  it  at  least  as  late  as  Defoe." 
"In  the  sixteenth  and  in  the  first  half  of  the  sev- 
enteenth century,"  says  Professor  Lounsbury, 
"while  both  ways  of  writing  these  words  existed 
side  by  side,  the  termination  er  is  far  more  com- 
mon than  that  in  re.  The  first  complete  edition 
of  Shakspere's  plays  was  published  in  1623.  In 
that  work  sepulcber  occurs  thirteen  times;  it  is 
spelled  eleven  times  with  er.  Scepter  occurs 
thirty-seven  times;  it  is  not  once  spelled  with  re, 
but  always  with  er.  Center  occurs  twelve  times, 
and  in  nine  instances  out  of  the  twelve  it  ends  in 
er"  So  we  see  that  this  so-called  "American 
spelling  "  is  fully  warranted  by  the  history  of  the 
English  language.  It  is  amusing  to  note  how 
305 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING" 

often  a  wider  and  a  deeper  study  of  English  will 
reveal  that  what  is  suddenly  denounced  in  Great 
Britain  as  the  very  latest  Americanism,  whether 
this  be  a  variation  in  speech  or  in  spelling,  is 
shown  to  be  really  a  survival  of  a  previous  usage 
of  our  language,  and  authorized  by  a  host  of 
precedents. 

Of  course  it  is  idle  to  kick  against  the  pricks  of 
progress,  and  no  doubt  in  due  season  Great 
Britain  and  her  colonial  dependencies  will  be 
content  again  to  spell  words  that  end  in  er  as 
Shakspere  and  Ben  Jonson  and  Spenser  spelled 
them.  But  when  we  get  so  far  toward  the  or- 
thographic millennium  that  we  all  spell  sepulcher, 
the  ghost  of  Thomas  Campbell  will  groan  within 
the  grave  at  the  havoc  then  wrought  in  the  final 
line  of  'Hohenlinden,'  which  will  cease  to  end 
with  even  the  outward  semblance  of  a  rime  to 
the  eye.  We  all  know  that 

On  Linden,  when  the  sun  was  low, 
All  bloodless  lay  the  untrodden  snow, 
And  dark  as  winter  was  the  flow 
Of  Iser,  rolling  rapidly; 

and  those  of  us  who  have  persevered  may  re- 
member that  with  one  exception  every  fourth 
line  of  Campbell's  poem  ends  with  a  y, — the 
words  are  rapidly,  scenery,  revelry,  artillery, 
canopy,  and  chivalry,  —  not  rimes  of  surpassing 
306 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING 

distinction,  any  of  them,  but  perhaps  passable 
to  a  reader  who  will  humor  the  final  syllable. 
The  one  exception  is  the  final  line  of  the  poem- 
Shall  be  a  soldier's  sepulchre. 

To  no  man's  ear  did  sepulchre  ever  rime  justly 
with  chivalry  and  canopy  and  artillery,  altho 
Campbell  may  have  so  contorted  his  vision  that 
he  evoked  the  dim  spook  of  a  rime  in  his  mind's 
eye.  A  rime  to  the  eye  is  a  sorry  thing  at  best, 
and  it  is  sorriest  when  it  depends  on  an  inaccu- 
rate and  evanescent  orthography. 

Dr.  Johnson  was  as  illogical  in  his  keeping  in 
and  leaving  out  of  the  u  in  words  like  honor  and 
governor  as  he  was  in  many  other  things;  and 
the  makers  of  later  dictionaries  have  departed 
widely  from  his  practice,  those  in  Great  Britain 
still  halting  half-way,  while  those  in  the  United 
States  have  gone  on  to  the  bitter  end.  The  il- 
logic  of  the  burly  lexicographer  is  shown  in  his 
omission  of  the  u  from  exterior  and  posterior, 
and  his  retention  of  it  in  the  kindred  words  in- 
teriour  and  anteriour ;  this,  indeed,  seems  like 
wilful  perversity,  and  justifies  Hood's  merry  jest 
about  "Dr.  Johnson's  Contradictionary."  The 
half-way  measures  of  later  British  lexicographers 
are  shown  in  their  omission  of  the  u  from  words 
which  Dr.  Johnson  spelled  emperour,  governour, 
307 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING 

oratour,  borrour,  and  dolour,  while  still  retain- 
ing it  in  favour  and  honour  and  a  few  others. 

The  reason  for  his  disgust  generally  given  by 
the  London  man  of  letters  who  is  annoyed  by 
the  "American  spelling"  of  honor  and  favor  is 
that  these  words  are  not  derived  directly  from  the 
Latin,  but  indirectly  through  the  French ;  this  is  the 
plea  put  forward  by  the  late  Archbishop  Trench. 
Even  if  this  plea  were  pertinent,  the  application 
of  this  theory  is  not  consistent  in  current  British 
orthography,  which  prescribes  the  omission  of 
the  u  from  error  and  emperor,  and  its  retention 
in  colour  and  honour  —  altho  all  four  words  are 
alike  derived  from  the  Latin  through  the  French. 
And  this  plea  fails  absolutely  to  account  for  the 
u  which  the  British  insist  on  preserving  in  har- 
bour and  in  neighbour,  words  not  derived  from 
the  Latin  at  all,  whether  directly  or  indirectly 
through  the  French.  An  American  may  well 
ask,  "If  the  u  in  honour  teaches  etymology, 
what  does  the  u  in  harbour  teach  ?  "  There  is 
no  doubt  that  the  u  in  harbour  teaches  a  false 
etymology;  and  there  is  no  doubt  also  that  the 
u  in  honour  has  been  made  to  teach  a  false  ety- 
mology, for  Trench's  derivation  of  this  final  our 
from  the  French  eur  is  absurd,  as  the  old  French 
was  our,  and  sometimes  ur,  sometimes  even  or. 
Pseudo-philology  of  this  sort  is  no  new  thing; 
Professor  Max  Muller  noted  that  the  Roman 
308 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING" 

prigs  used  to  spell  cena  (to  show  their  knowledge 
of  Greek),  coena,  as  if  the  word  were  somehow 
connected  with  HOIVT\. 

Thus  we  see  that  the  u  in  honour  suggests  a 
false  etymology;  so  does  the  ue  in  tongue,  and 
the  g  in  sovereign,  and  the  c  in  scent,  and  the  s 
in  island,  and  the  mp  in  comptroller,  and  the  b 
in  rhyme  ;  and  there  are  many  more  of  our  ordi- 
nary orthographies  which  are  quite  as  misleading 
from  a  philological  point  of  view.  As  the  late 
Professor  Hadley  mildly  put  it,  "our  common 
spelling  is  often  an  untrustworthy  guide  to  ety- 
mology." But  why  should  we  expect  or  desire 
spelling  to  be  a  guide  to  etymology  ?  If  it  is  to 
be  a  guide  at  all,  we  may  fairly  insist  on  its  being 
trustworthy;  and  so  we  cannot  help  thinking 
scorn  of  those  who  insist  on  retaining  a  superflu- 
ous u  in  harbour. 

But  why  should  orthography  be  made  subser- 
vient to  etymology  ?  What  have  the  two  things 
in  common  ?  They  exist  for  wholly  different 
ends,  to  be  attained  by  wholly  different  means. 
To  bend  either  from  its  own  work  to  the  aid  of 
the  other  is  to  impair  the  utility  of  both.  This 
truth  is  recognized  by  all  etymologists,  and  by 
all  students  of  language,  altho  it  has  not  yet 
found  acceptance  among  men  of  letters,  who  are 
rarely  students  of  language  in  the  scientific  sense. 
"It  may  be  observed,"  Mr.  Sweet  declares, 
309 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING 

"that  it  is  mainly  among  the  class  of  half-taught 
dabblers  in  philology  that  etymological  spelling 
has  found  its  supporters " ;  and  he  goes  on  to 
say  that  "all  true  philologists  and  philological 
bodies  have  uniformly  denounced  it  as  a  monstrous 
absurdity  both  from  a  practical  and  a  scientific  point 
of  view."  I  should  never  dare  to  apply  to  the  late 
Archbishop  Trench  and  the  London  journalists 
who  echo  his  errors  so  harsh  a  phrase  as  Mr. 
Sweet's  "half-taught  dabblers  in  philology"; 
but  when  a  fellow-Briton  uses  it  perhaps  I  may 
venture  to  quote  it  without  reproach. 

As  I  have  said  before,  the  alleged  "American 
spelling "  differs  but  very  slightly  from  that 
which  prevails  in  England.  A  wandering  New- 
Yorker  who  rambles  through  London  is  able  to 
collect  now  and  again  evidences  of  orthographic 
survivals  which  give  him  a  sudden  sense  of  being 
in  an  older,  country  than  his  own.  I  have  seen  a 
man  whose  home  was  near  Gramercy  Park  stop 
short  in  the  middle  of  a  little  street  in  Mayfair, 
and  point  with  ecstatic  delight  to  the  strip  of 
paper  across  the  glass  door  of  a  bar  proclaiming 
that  CYDER  was  sold  within.  I  have  seen  the 
same  man  thrill  with  pure  joy  before  the  shop  of 
a  chymist  in  the  window  of  which  corn-plaisters 
were  offered  for  sale.  He  wondered  why  a 
British  house  should  have  storeys  when  an 
American  house  has  stories ;  and  he  disliked  in- 
310 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING" 

tensely  the  wanton  e  wherewith  British  printers 
have  recently  disfigured  form,  which  in  the  latest 
London  typographical  vocabularies  appears  as 
forme.  This  e  in  form  is  a  gratuitous  addition, 
and  therefore  contrary  to  the  trend  of  ortho- 
graphic progress,  which  aims  at  the  suppression 
of  all  arbitrary  and  needless  letters. 

The  so-called  "American  spelling"  differs 
from  the  spelling  which  obtains  in  England  only 
in  so  far  as  it  has  yielded  a  little  more  readily  to 
the  forces  which  make  for  progress,  for  uniform- 
ity, for  logic,  for  common  sense.  But  just  how 
fortuitous  and  chaotic  the  condition  of  English 
spelling  is  nowadays  both  in  Great  Britain  and 
in  the  United  States  no  man  knows  who  has  not 
taken  the  trouble  to  investigate  for  himself.  In 
England,  the  reactionary  orthography  of  Samuel 
Johnson  is  no  longer  accepted  by  all.  In  Amer- 
ica, the  revolutionary  orthography  of  Noah 
Webster  has  been  receded  from  even  by  his  own 
inheritors.  There  is  no  standard,  no  authority, 
not  even  that  of  a  powerful,  resolute,  and  domi- 
neering personality. 

Perhaps  the  attitude  of  philologists  toward 
the  present  spelling  of  the  English  language,  and 
their  opinion  of  those  who  are  up  in  arms  in  de- 
fense of  it,  have  never  been  more  tersely  stated 
than  in  Professor  Lounsbury's  most  admirable 
'  Studies  in  Chaucer,'  a  work  which  I  should  term 
3" 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING 

eminently  scholarly,  if  that  phrase  did  not  perhaps 
give  a  false  impression  of  a  book  wherein  the  re- 
sults of  learning  are  set  forth  with  the  most  adroit 
literary  art,  and  with  an  uninsistent  but  omni- 
present humor,  which  is  a  constant  delight  to  the 
reader: 

"There  is  certainly  nothing  more  contempti- 
ble than  our  present  spelling,  unless  it  be  the 
reasons  usually  given  for  clinging  to  it.  The 
divorce  which  has  unfortunately  almost  always 
existed  between  English  letters  and  English 
scholarship  makes  nowhere  a  more  pointed  ex- 
hibition of  itself  than  in  the  comments  which 
men  of  real  literary  ability  make  upon  proposals 
to  change  or  modify  the  cast-iron  framework  in 
which  our  words  are  now  clothed.  On  one  side 
there  is  an  absolute  agreement  of  view  on  the 
part  of  those  who  are  authorized  by  their  know- 
ledge of  the  subject  to  pronounce  an  opinion. 
These  are  well  aware  that  the  present  ortho- 
graphy hides  the  history  of  the  word  instead  of 
revealing  it;  that  it  is  a  stumbling-block  in  the 
way  of  derivation  or  of  pronunciation  instead  of 
a  guide  to  it;  that  it  is  not  in  any  sense  a  growth 
or  development,  but  a  mechanical  malformation, 
which  owes  its  existence  to  the  ignorance  of 
early  printers  and  the  necessity  of  consulting  the 
convenience  of  printing-offices.  This  consensus 
of  scholars  makes  the  slightest  possible  impres- 
312 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING" 

sion  upon  men  of  letters  throughout  the  whole 
great  Anglo-Saxon  community.  There  is  hardly 
one  of  them  who  is  not  calmly  confident  of  the 
superiority  of  his  opinion  to  that  of  the  most 
famous  special  students  who  have  spent  years  in 
examining  the  subject.  There  is  hardly  one  of 
them  who  does  not  fancy  he  is  manifesting  a 
noble  conservatism  by  holding  fast  to  some  spell- 
ing peculiarly  absurd,  and  thereby  maintaining  a 
bulwark  against  the  ruin  of  the  tongue.  There 
is  hardly  one  of  them  who  has  any  hesitation  in 
discussing  the  question  in  its  entirety,  while 
every  word  he  utters  shows  that  he  does  not 
understand  even  its  elementary  principles.  There 
would  be  something  thoroughly  comic  in  turn- 
ing into  a  fierce  international  dispute  the  question 
of  spelling  honor  without  the  u,  were  it  not  for 
the  depression  which  every  student  of  the  lan- 
guage cannot  well  help  feeling  in  contemplating 
the  hopeless  abysmal  ignorance  of  the  history  of 
the  tongue  which  any  educated  man  must  first 
possess  in  order  to  become  excited  over  the  sub- 
ject at  all."  ('Studies  in  Chaucer,'  vol.  iii.,  pp. 
265-267.) 

Pronunciation  is  slowly  but  steadily  changing. 
Sometimes  it  is  going  further  and  further  away 
from  the  orthography;  for  example,  either  and 
neither  are  getting  more  and  more  to  have  in 
their  first  syllable  the  long  /  sound  instead  of  the 
3'3 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING 

long  e  sound  which  they  had  once.  Sometimes 
it  is  being  modified  to  agree  with  the  orthogra- 
phy; for  example,  the  older  pronunciations  of 
again  to  rime  with  men,  and  of  been  to  rime 
with  pin,  in  which  I  was  carefully  trained  as  a 
boy,  seem  to  me  to  be  giving  way  before  a  pro- 
nunciation in  exact  accord  with  the  spelling, 
again  to  rime  with  pain,  and  been  to  rime 
with  seen.  These  two  illustrations  are  from  the 
necessarily  circumscribed  experience  of  a  single 
observer,  and  the  observation  of  others  may  not 
bear  me  out  in  my  opinion;  but  tho  the  illustra- 
tions fall  to  the  ground,  the  main  assertion,  that 
pronunciation  is  changing,  is  indisputable. 

No  doubt  the  change  is  less  rapid  than  it  was 
before  the  invention  of  printing;  far  less  rapid 
than  it  was  before  the  days  of  the  public  school 
and  of  the  morning  newspaper.  There  are  vari- 
ations of  pronunciation  in  different  parts  of  the 
United  States  and  of  Great  Britain,  as  there  are 
variations  of  vocabulary;  but  in  the  future  there 
will  be  a  constantly  increasing  tendency  for 
these  variations  to  disappear.  There  are  irre- 
sistible forces  making  for  uniformity  —  forces 
which  are  crushing  out  Platt-Deutsch  in  Ger- 
many, Provencal  in  France,  Romansch  in  Swit- 
zerland. There  is  a  desire  to  see  a  standard  set 
up  to  which  all  may  strive  to  conform.  In 
France  a  standard  of  pronunciation  is  found  at 
3'4 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING 

the  Comedie  Franchise;  and  in  Germany,  what 
is  almost  a  standard  of  vocabulary  has  been  set 
in  what  is  now  known  as  Bilbnen-Deutscb. 

In  France  the  Academy  was  constituted  chiefly 
to  be  a  guardian  of  the  language;  and  the 
Academy,  properly  conservative  as  it  needs  must 
be,  is  engaged  in  a  slow  reform  of  French  ortho- 
graphy, yielding  to  the  popular  demand  decorously 
and  judiciously.  By  official  action,  also,  the 
orthography  of  German  has  been  simplified  and 
made  more  logical  and  brought  into  closer  rela- 
tion with  modern  pronunciation.  Even  more 
thorough  reforms  have  been  carried  through  in 
Italy,  in  Spain,  and  in  Holland.  Yet  neither 
French  nor  German,  not  Italian,  Spanish,  or 
Dutch,  stood  half  as  much  in  need  of  the  broom 
of  reform  as  English,  for  in  no  one  of  these  lan- 
guages were  there  so  many  dark  corners  which 
needed  cleaning  out ;  in  no  one  of  them  the  differ- 
ence between  orthography  and  pronunciation  so 
wide;  and  in  no  one  of  them  was  the  accepted 
spelling  debased  by  numberless  false  etymologies. 

Beyond  all  question,  what  is  needed  on  both 
sides  of  the  Atlantic,  in  the  United  States  as 
well  as  in  Great  Britain,  is  a  conviction  that  the 
existing  orthography  of  English  is  not  sacred, 
and  that  to  tamper  with  it  is  not  high  treason. 
What  is  needed  is  the  consciousness  that  neither 
Samuel  Johnson  nor  Noah  Webster  compiled  his 


AS  TO  "AMERICAN  SPELLING" 

dictionary  under  direct  inspiration.  What  is 
needed  is  an  awakening  to  the  fact  that  our 
spelling,  so  far  from  being  immaculate  at  its  best, 
is,  at  its  best,  hardly  less  absurd  than  the  hap- 
hazard, rule-of-thumb,  funnily  phonetic  spelling 
of  Artemus  Ward  and  of  Josh  Billings.  What  is 
needed  is  anything  which  will  break  up  the 
lethargy  of  satisfaction  with  the  accepted  ortho- 
graphy, and  help  to  open  the  eyes  of  readers  and 
writers  to  the  stupidity  of  the  present  system  and 
tend  to  make  them  discontented  with  it. 
(,892) 


316 


XIII 

THE  SIMPLIFICATION  OF  ENGLISH 
SPELLING 


THE   SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH 
SPELLING 

IN  a  communication  to  a  London  review  Pro- 
fessor W.  W.  Skeat  remarked  that  "  it  is  no- 
torious that  all  the  leading  philologists  of  Europe, 
during  the  last  quarter  of  a  century,  have  unani- 
mously condemned  the  present  chaotic  spelling 
of  the  English  language,  and  have  received  on 
the  part  of  the  public  generally,  and  of  the  most 
blatant  and  ignorant  among  the  self-constituted 
critics,  nothing  but  abusive  ridicule,  which  is 
meant  to  be  scathing,  but  is  harmless  from  its 
silliness  " ;  and  it  cannot  be  denied  that  the  ortho- 
graphic simplifications  which  the  leading  phi- 
lologists of  Great  Britain  and  the  United  States 
are  advocating  have  not  yet  been  widely  adopted. 
In  an  aggressive  article  an  American  essayist  has 
sought  to  explain  this  by  the  assertion  that  pho- 
netic-reform "  is  hopelessly,  unspeakably,  sicken- 
ingly  vulgar;  and  this  is  an  eternal  reason  why 
men  and  women  of  taste,  refinement,  and  dis- 
crimination will  reject  it  with  a  shudder  of  dis- 
319 


THE   SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

gust."  Satisfactory  as  this  explanation  may  seem 
to  the  essayist,  I  have  a  certain  difficulty  in  ac- 
cepting it  myself,  since  I  find  on  the  list  of  the 
vice-presidents  of  the  Orthographic  Union  the 
names  of  Mr.  Howells,  of  Colonel  Higginson,  of 
Dr.  Eggleston,  of  Professor  Lounsbury,  and  of 
President  White;  and  even  if  I  was  willing  to 
admit  that  these  gentlemen  were  all  of  them 
lacking  in  taste,  refinement,  and  discrimination, 
I  still  could  not  agree  with  the  aggressive  essay- 
ist so  long  as  my  own  name  was  on  the  same 
list. 

What  strikes  me  as  a  better  explanation  is  that 
given  by  the  president  of  the  Orthographic 
Union,  Mr.  Benjamin  E.  Smith,  who  has  sug- 
gested that  phonetic-reformers  have  asked  too 
much,  and  so  have  received  too  little;  they  have 
demanded  an  immediate  and  radical  change,  and 
as  a  result  they  have  frightened  away  all  but  the 
most  resolute  radicals;  they  have  failed  to  reckon 
with  the  immense  conservatism  which  gives  sta- 
bility to  all  the  institutions  of  the  English- 
speaking  race.  As  Mr.  Smith  puts  it,  "  there  is  a 
deep-rooted  feeling  that  the  existing  printed  form 
is  not  only  a  symbol  but  the  most  fitting  symbol 
for  our  mother-tongue,  and  that  a  radical  change 
must  impair  for  us  the  beauty  and  spiritual  effec- 
tiveness of  that  which  it  symbolizes." 

A  part  of  the  unreadiness  of  the  public  to  listen 
320 


THE  SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

to  the  advocates  of  phonetic-reform  has  been  due 
also  to  the  general  consciousness  that  pronuncia- 
tion is  not  fixed  but  very  variable  indeed,  being 
absolutely  alike  in  no  two  places  where  English 
is  spoken,  and  perhaps  in  no  two  persons  who 
speak  English.  The  humorous  poet  has  shown 
to  us  how  the  little  word  vase  once  served  as  a 
shibboleth  to  reveal  the  homes  of  each  of  the  four 
young  ladies  who  came  severally  from  New 
York  and  Boston  and  Philadelphia  and  Kalama- 
zoo.  The  difference  between  the  pronunciation 
of  New  York  and  Boston  is  not  so  marked  as 
that  between  London  and  Edinburgh— or  as  that 
between  New  York  and  London.  And  the  pro- 
nunciation of  to-day  is  not  that  of  to-morrow ;  it 
is  constantly  being  modified,  sometimes  by  im- 
perceptible degrees  and  sometimes  by  a  sudden 
change  like  the  arbitrary  substitution  of  aitberand 
naither  for  eether  and  neetber.  Now,  if  pronunci- 
ation is  not  uniform  in  any  two  persons,  in  any 
two  places,  at  any  two  periods,  the  wayfaring 
man  is  not  to  blame  if  he  is  in  doubt,  first,  as  to 
the  possibility  of  a  uniform  phonetic  spelling, 
and,  second,  as  to  its  permanence  even  if  it  was 
once  to  be  attained. 

A  glance  down  the  history  of  English  ortho- 
graphy discloses  the  fact  that,  however  chaotic  our 
spelling  may  seem  to  be  now  or  may  seem  to 
have  been  in  Shakspere's  day,  it  is  and  it  always 
321 


THE   SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

has  been  striving  ineffectively  to  be  phonetic. 
Always  the  attempt  has  been  to  use  the  letters  of 
the  word  to  represent  its  sounds.  From  the  be- 
ginning there  has  been  an  unceasing  struggle  to 
keep  the  orthography  as  phonetic  as  might  be. 
This  continuous  striving  toward  exactness  of 
sound-reproduction  has  never  been  radical  or  vio- 
lent; it  has  always  been  halting  and  half-hearted: 
but  it  has  been  constant,  and  it  has  accomplished 
marvels  in  the  course  of  the  centuries.  The 
most  that  we  can  hope  to  do  is  to  help  along 
this  good  work,  to  hasten  this  inevitable  but  be- 
lated progress,  to  make  the  transitions  as  easy  as 
possible,  and  to  smooth  the  way  so  that  the 
needful  improvements  may  follow  one  another  as 
swiftly  as  shall  be  possible.  We  must  remem- 
ber that  a  half-loaf  is  better  than  no  bread ;  and 
we  must  remind  ourselves  frequently  that  the 
greatest  statesmen  have  been  opportunists,  know- 
ing what  they  wanted,  but  taking  what  they 
could  get. 

We  have  now  to  face  the  fact  that  in  no  lan- 
guage is  a  sudden  and  far-reaching  reform  in 
spelling  ever  likely  to  be  attained;  and  in  none  is 
it  less  likely  than  in  English.  The  history  of  the 
peoples  who  use  our  tongue  on  both  sides  of  the 
Atlantic  proves  that  they  belong  to  a  stock  which 
is  wont  to  make  haste  slowly,  to  take  one  step  at 
a  time,  and  never  to  allow  itself  to  be  overmas- 
322 


THE  SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

tered  by  mere  logic.  By  a  series  of  gradations 
almost  invisible  the  loose  confederacy  of  1776 
developed  into  the  firm  union  of  1861,  which  was 
glad  to  grant  to  Abraham  Lincoln  a  power  broader 
than  that  wielded  by  any  dictator.  Even  the 
abolition  of  the  corn-laws  and  the  adoption  of 
free-trade  in  Great  Britain,  sudden  as  it  may  seem, 
was  only  the  final  result  of  a  long  series  of 
events. 

The  securing  of  an  absolutely  phonetic  spelling 
being  impracticable,— even  if  it  was  altogether 
desirable,— the  efforts  of  those  who  are  dissatis- 
fied with  the  prevailing  orthography  of  our  lan- 
guage had  best  be  directed  toward  the  perfectly 
practical  end  of  getting  our  improvement  on  the 
instalment  plan.  We  must  seek  now  to  have 
only  the  most  flagrant  absurdities  corrected.  We 
must  be  satisfied  to  advance  little  by  little.  We 
must  begin  by  showing  that  there  is  nothing 
sacrosanct  about  the  present  spelling  either  in 
Great  Britain  or  in  the  United  States.  We  must 
make  it  clear  to  all  who  are  willing  to  listen— and 
it  is  our  duty  to  be  persuasive  always  and  never 
dogmatic— that  the  effort  of  the  English  language 
to  rid  itself  of  orthographic  anomalies  is  almost 
as  old  as  the  language  itself.  We  must  show 
those  who  insist  on  leaving  the  present  spelling 
undisturbed  that  in  taking  this  attitude  they  are 
setting  themselves  in  opposition  to  the  past, 


THE  SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

which  they  pretend  to  respect.  The  average  man 
is  open  to  conviction  if  you  do  not  try  to  brow- 
beat him  into  adopting  your  beliefs;  and  he  can 
be  induced  to  accept  improvements,  one  at  a 
time,  if  he  has  it  made  plain  to  him  that  each  of 
these  is  but  one  in  a  series  unrolling  itself  since 
Chaucer.  We  must  convince  the  average  man 
that  we  want  merely  to  continue  the  good  work 
of  our  forefathers,  and  that  the  real  innovators  are 
those  who  maintain  the  absolute  inviolability  of 
our  present  spelling. 

Even  the  vehement  essayist  from  whom  I  have 
quoted  already,  and  who  is  the  boldest  of  later 
opponents  of  phonetic-reform,  is  vehement  chiefly 
against  the  various  schemes  of  wholesale  revi- 
sion. He  himself  refuses  to  make  any  modifi- 
cation,—except  to  revert  now  and  again  to  a 
medievalism  \\kepadagogue,—  but  he  knows  the 
history  of  language  too  well  not  to  be  forced  to 
admit  that  a  simplification  of  some  sort  is  certain 
to  be  achieved  in  the  future.  "  The  written  forms 
of  English  words  will  change  in  time,  as  the  lan- 
guage itself  will  change,"  he  confesses;  "it  will 
change  in  its  vocabulary,  in  its  idioms,  in  its 
pronunciation,  and  perhaps  to  some  extent  in  its 
structural  form.  For  change  is  the  one  essential 
and  inevitable  phenomenon  of  a  living  language, 
as  it  is  of  any  living  organism ;  and  with  these 
changes,  slow  and  silent  and  unconscious,  will 
324 


THE   SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

come  a  change  in  the  orthography."  As  we  read 
this  admirable  statement  we  cannot  but  wonder 
why  a  writer  who  understands  so  well  the  con- 
ditions of  linguistic  growth  should  wish  to  bind 
his  own  language  in  the  cast-iron  bonds  of  an 
outworn  orthography.  We  may  wonder  also 
why  he  is  not  consistent  in  his  own  practice,  and 
why  he  does  not  spell  phenomenon  as  Macaulay 
did  only  threescore  and  ten  years  ago. 

Underneath  the  American  essayist's  objection 
to  any  orthographic  simplification  in  English,  and 
underneath  the  plaintive  protests  of  certain  British 
men  of  letters  against  "American  spelling,"  so 
called,  lies  the  assumption  that  there  is  at  the 
present  moment  a  "regular"  spelling,  which  has 
existed  time  out  of  mind  and  which  the  tasteless 
reformers  wish  to  destroy.  For  this  assumption 
there  is  no  warrant  whatever.  The  orthography 
of  our  language  has  never  been  stable;  it  has 
always  been  fluctuating;  and  no  authority  has 
ever  been  given  to  anybody  to  lay  down  laws  for 
its  regulation.  For  a  convention  to  have  validity 
it  must  have  won  general  acceptance  at  some 
period;  and  the  history  of  English  shows  that 
there  has  never  been  any  such  common  agree- 
ment, expressed  or  implied,  in  regard  to  English 
spelling.  Some  of  the  unphonetic  forms  which 
are  most  vigorously  defended,  as  hallowed  by 
custom  and  by  sentiment,  are  comparatively  re- 

325 


THE   SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

cent;  and  others  which  seem  as  sacred  have  had 
foisted  into  them  needless  letters  conveying  false 
impressions  about  their  origins. 

That  there  is  no  theory  or  practice  of  English 
orthography  universally  accepted  to-day  is  ob- 
vious to  all  who  may  take  the  trouble  to  observe 
for  themselves.  The  spelling  adopted  by  the 
'  Century  Magazine '  is  different  from  that  to  be 
found  in  'Harper's  Magazine';  and  this  differs 
again  from  that  insisted  upon  in  the  pages','of  the 
'Bookman.'  The  'Century'  has  gone  a  little  in 
advance  of  American  spelling  generally,  as  seen  in 
'  Harper's,'  and  the '  Bookman  '  is  intentionally  re- 
actionary. In  the  United  States  orthography  is 
in  a  healthier  state  of  instability  than  it  is  in 
Great  Britain,  where  there  is  a  closer  approxima- 
tion to  a  deadening  uniformity;  but  even  in  Lon- 
don and  Edinburgh  those  who  are  on  the  watch 
can  discover  many  a  divergence  from  the  strict 
letter  of  the  doctrine  of  orthographic  rigidity. 

And  just  as  there  is  no  system  of  English  spell- 
ing tacitly  agreed  on  by  all  men  of  education 
usingthe  English  language  at  present,  so  there  was 
also  no  system  of  English  spelling  consistently 
and  continually  used  by  our  ancestors  in  the  past. 
The  orthography  of  Matthew  Arnold  differs  a 
little,  altho  not  much,  from  the  orthography  of 
Macaulay;  and  that  in  turn  a  little  from  the  or- 
thography of  Johnson.  In  like  manner  the  spell- 
326 


THE   SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

ing  of  Dryden  is  very  different  from  the  spelling 
of  Spenser,  and  the  spelling  of  Spenser  is  very 
different  from  the  spelling  of  Chaucer.  At  no 
time  in  the  long  unrolling  of  English  literature 
from  Chaucer  to  Arnold  has  there  been  any  agree- 
ment among  those  who  used  the  language  as  to 
any  precise  way  in  which  its  words  should  be 
spelled  or  even  as  to  any  theory  which  should 
govern  particular  instances.  The  history  of  Eng- 
lish orthography  is  a  record  still  incomplete  of 
incessant  variation;  and  a  study  of  it  shows 
plainly  how  there  have  been  changes  in  every 
generation,  some  of  them  logical  and  some  of 
them  arbitrary,  some  of  them  helpful  simplifica- 
tions, and  some  of  them  gross  perversities. 

Thus  we  see  that  those  who  defend  any  exist- 
ing orthography,  which  they  choose  to  regard  as 
"  regular "  and  outside  of  which  they  affect  to 
behold  only  vulgar  aberration,  are  setting  them- 
selves against  the  example  left  us  by  our  fore- 
fathers. We  see  also  that  those  of  us  who  are 
striving  to  modify  our  spelling  in  moderation  are 
doing  exactly  what  has  been  done  by  every  gen- 
eration that  preceded  us.  To  repeat  in  other 
words  what  I  have  said  already,  there  is  not  any 
system  of  English  orthography  which  is  sup- 
ported by  a  universal  convention  to-day  or  which 
has  any  sanctity  from  its  supposed  antiquity. 

The  opponents  of  simplification  have  been 
327 


THE  SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

greatly  aided  by  the  general  acceptance  of  this 
assumption  of  theirs  that  the  advocates  of  sim- 
plification wanted  to  remove  ancient  landmarks, 
to  break  with  the  past,  to  introduce  endless  in- 
novations. The  best  part  of  their  case  will  fall 
to  the  ground  when  it  is  generally  understood 
that  the  orthography  of  our  language  has  never 
been  fixed  for  a  decad  at  a  time.  And  this  un- 
derstanding of  the  real  facts  of  the  situation  is 
likely  to  be  enlarged  in  the  immediate  future  by 
the  wide  circulation  of  many  recent  reprints  of 
the  texts  of  the  great  authors  of  the  past  in  the 
exact  spelling  of  the  original  edition.  So  long  as 
we  were  in  the  habit  of  seeing  the  works  of 
Shakspere  and  Steele,  of  Scott,  Thackeray,  and 
Hawthorne,  all  in  an  orthography  which,  if  not 
uniform  exactly,  did  not  vary  widely,  we  were 
sorely  tempted  to  say  that  the  spelling  which 
was  good  enough  for  them  is  good  enough  for 
us  and  for  our  children. 

But  when  we  have  in  our  hands  the  works 
of  those  great  writers  as  they  were  originally 
printed,  and  when  we  are  forced  to  remark  that 
they  spell  in  no  wise  alike  one  to  the  other;  and 
when  we  discover  that  such  uniformity  of  or- 
thography they  may  have  seemed  to  have  was 
due,  not  to  any  theory  of  the  authors  themselves, 
but  merely  to  the  practice  of  the  modern  print- 
ing-offices and  proof-readers—when  these  things 
328 


THE  SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

are  brought  home  to  us,  any  superstitious  reve- 
rence bids  fair  to  vanish  which  we  may  have  had 
for  the  orthography  we  believed  to  be  Shakspere's 
and  Steele's  and  Scott's  and  Thackeray's  and 
Hawthorne's. 

And  one  indirect  result  of  this  scholarly  desire 
to  get  as  near  as  may  be  to  the  masterpiece  as  the 
author  himself  presented  it  to  the  world,  is  that 
men  of  letters  and  lovers  of  literature— two 
classes  hitherto  strangely  ignorant  of  the  history 
of  the  English  language  and  of  the  constant 
changes  always  going  on  in  its  vocabulary,  in  its 
syntax,  and  in  its  orthography— will  at  least  have 
the  chance  to  acquire  information  at  first  hand. 
Their  resistance  to  simplification  ought  to  be- 
come less  irreconcilable  when  the  men  of  letters, 
now  its  chief  opponents,  have  discovered  for 
themselves  that  there  is  not  now  and  never  has 
been  any  stable  system  of  orthography.  When 
they  really  grasp  the  fact  that  there  has  been  no 
permanency  in  the  past  and  that  there  is  no  uni- 
formity in  the  present,  perhaps  they  will  show 
themselves  less  unwilling  to  take  the  next  step 
forward.  Just  now  they  are  rather  like  the 
Tories,  who,  as  Aubrey  de  Vere  declared,  wanted 
to  uninvent  printing  and  to  undiscover  America. 

The  most  powerful  single  influence  in  fixing 
the  present  absurd  spelling  of  our  language  was 
undoubtedly  Johnson's  Dictionary,  published  in 
329 


THE   SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century.  We  can- 
not but  respect  the  solid  learning  of  Dr.  Johnson 
and  his  indomitable  energy;  but  the  making  of 
an  English  dictionary  was  not  the  task  for  which 
his  previous  studies  had  preeminently  fitted  him. 
Probably  he  would  have  succeeded  better  with  a 
Latin  dictionary;  and  indeed  there  is  something 
characteristically  incongruous  in  the  spectacle  of 
the  burly  doctor's  spending  his  toil  in  compiling 
a  list  of  the  words  in  a  language  the  use  of  which 
he  held  to  be  disgraceful  in  a  friend's  epitaph. 
Johnson  was,  in  fact,  as  unfit  a  person  as  could  be 
found  to  record  English  orthography,  a  task  calling 
for  a  science  the  existence  of  which  he  did  not 
even  suspect,  and  for  a  delicacy  of  perception  he 
lacked  absolutely.  In  all  matters  of  taste  he  was 
an  elephantine  pachyderm;  and  there  are  only  a 
few  of  his  principles  of  criticism  which  are  not 
now  disestablished. 

Any  one  whose  reading  is  at  all  varied  and  who 
strays  outside  of  books  printed  within  the  past 
quarter-century,  can  find  abundant  evidence  of 
the  former  chaos  of  English  orthography.  In 
Moxon's  '  Mechanic  Exercises,'  published  in  1683, 
for  example,  we  read  that  "  how  well  other  For- 
rain  languages  are  Corrected  by  the  Author,  we 
may  perceive  by  the  English  that  is  Printed  in 
Forrain  Countries  " ;  and  this  shows  us  that  the 
phonetic  form  forrain  is  older  than  the  unpho- 
330 


THE   SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

netic  foreign.  In  the  'Spectator'  (No.  510) 
Steele  wrote  landskip  where  we  should  now 
write  landscape  ;  in  Addison's  criticism  of  '  Para- 
dise Lost/  contributed  to  the  same  periodical,  we 
find  critich,  beroick,  and  epich ;  and  whether 
Steele  or  Addison  held  the  pen,  ribbons  were  then 
always  ribands. 

On  the  title-page  of  the  first  edition  of  '  Rob- 
inson Crusoe,'  published  in  1719,  we  are  told  that 
we  can  read  within  "  an  account  of  how  he  was 
at  last  strangely  delivered  by  Pyrates."  Fielding, 
in  the  '  Champion '  in  1740,  tells  us  that  "dinner 
soon  follow'd,  being  a  gammon  of  bacon  and 
some  chickens,  with  a  most  excellent  app\e-pye." 
In  the  same  essay  Fielding  wrote  that "  our  friends 
exprest  great  pleasure  at  our  drinking";  and  in 
'  Tom  Jones  '  he  wrote  profest  for  professed  (as 
we  should  now  spell  it).  Here  we  discover  that 
the  nineteenth  century  is  sometimes  more  back- 
ward than  the  eighteenth,  profest  and  exprest 
being  the  very  spellings  which  many  are  now 
advocating.  Fielding  also  wrote  Salique  where 
we  should  now  write  Salic,  as  Wotton  had  writ- 
ten Dorique  for  Doric  in  a  letter  to  Milton ;  and 
here  the  advantage  is  with  us.  So  it  is  also  in 
our  spelling  of  the  italicized  word  in  the  playbill 
of  the  third  night  of  Mr.  Cooper's  engagement  at 
the  Charleston  theater,  Friday,  April  18,  1796: 
"  Smoaking  in  the  Theatre  Prohibited." 
33' 


THE   SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

Attention  has  already  been  called  to  Macaulay's 
phenomenon  (and  to  Professor  Peck's  peda- 
gogue). The  abolition  of  the  digraph  has  been 
a  protracted  enterprise  not  yet  completed.  In  a 
translation  of  Schlegel's  '  Lectures  on  Dramatic 
Literature,'  published  in  London  early  in  the 
nineteenth  century,  I  have  found  ccra  for  era  ;  and 
in  the  eighteenth  century  economics  was  oeconom- 
ics.  Esthetic  has  not  yet  quite  expelled  cesthetic, 
altho  anesthetic  seems  now  fairly  established. 

The  Greek  ph  is  also  a  stumbling-block.  We 
write  phantom  on  the  one  hand  and  fancy  on  the 
other,  and  either  phantasy  or  fantasy;  yet  all 
these  words  are  derived  from  the  same  Greek 
root.  Probably  phancy  would  seem  as  absurd  to 
most  of  us  as  fantotn.  Yet  fantasy  has  only 
recently  begun  to  get  the  better  of  phantasy.  The 
Italians  are  bolder  than  we  are,  for  they  have  not 
hesitated  to  write  filosofia  and  fotografia.  To 
most  of  us  fotografer,  as  we  read  it  on  a  sign  in 
Union  Square,  seems  truly  outlandish;  and  yet  if 
our  great-grandfathers  were  willing  to  accept 
fancy  there  is  no  logical  reason  why  our  great- 
grandchildren may  not  accept  fotografy.  There 
is  no  longer  any  logical  basis  for  opposition  on 
the  ground  of  scholarship.  Indeed,  the  scholarly 
opposition  to  these  orthographic  simplifications 
is  not  unlike  the  opposition  in  Germany  to  the 
adoption  of  the  Roman  alphabet  by  those  who 
332 


THE  SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

cling  to  the  old  Gothic  letter  on  the  ground  that 
it  is  more  German,  altho  it  is  in  reality  only 
a  medieval  corruption  of  the  Roman  letter.  With 
those  who  speak  German,  as  with  those  who 
speak  English,  the  chief  obstacle  to  the  accom- 
plishment of  proposed  improvements  in  writing 
the  language  is  to  be  found  in  the  general  igno- 
rance of  its  history— or  perhaps  rather  in  that 
conceited  half-knowledge  which  is  always  more 
dangerous  than  modest  ignorance. 

To  diffuse  accurate  information  about  the  his- 
tory of  English  orthography  is  the  most  pressing 
and  immediate  duty  now  before  those  of  us  who 
wish  to  see  our  spelling  simplified.  We  must 
keep  reminding  those  we  wish  to  convince  that 
we  want  their  aid  in  helping  along  the  movement 
which  has  in  the  past  changed  musique  to  music, 
riband  to  ribbon,  phantasy  to  fantasy,  cera  to 
era,  phenomenon  to  phenomenon,  and  which  in 
the  present  is  changing  catalogue  to  catalog,  ces- 
tbetic  to  esthetic,  programme  to  program,  technique 
to  technic. 

There  never  has  been  any  "regular"  spelling 
accepted  by  everybody,  or  any  system  of  or- 
thography sustained  by  universal  convention.  To 
assume  that  there  is  anything  of  the  sort  is 
adroitly  to  beg  the  very  question  at  issue.  There 
are  always  in  English  many  words  the  spelling  of 
which  is  not  finally  fixed;  and  these  doubtful 
333 


THE   SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

orthographies  Professor  Peck,  for  example,  would 
decide  in  one  way  and  Professor  Skeat  would  de- 
cide in  another.  The  most  of  Professor  Peck's 
decisions  would  result  in  conforming  his  spelling 
to  that  which  obtains  in  the  printing-office  of  the 
London  Times,  but  in  several  cases  he  would 
exercise  the  right  of  private  judgment,  spelling 
pedagogue,  for  example,  and  Vergil.  But  if  he 
chooses  to  exercise  the  right  of  private  judgment, 
he  is  estopped  from  denying  this  right  also  to 
Professor  Skeat;  and  the  moment  either  of  them 
sets  up  the  personal  equation  as  a  guide,  all  pre- 
tense of  an  accepted  system  vanishes. 

It  is  our  duty  also  to  draw  attention  to  the 
fact  that  it  is  a  wholesome  thing  that  there  is 
no  accepted  system  and  that  the  orthography  of 
our  language  should  be  free  to  modify  itself  in 
the  future  as  it  has  in  the  past.  It  is  this  absence 
of  system  which  gives  fluidity  and  flexibility  and 
the  faculty  of  adaptation  to  changing  conditions. 
The  Chief  Justice  of  England,  when  he  addressed 
the  American  Bar  Association,  recorded  his  pro- 
test against  a  cast-iron  code  in  law  as  tending  to 
hinder  legal  development;  and  our  language,  like 
our  law,  must  beware  lest  it  lose  its  power  of 
conforming  to  the  needs  of  our  people  as  these 
may  be  unexpectedly  developed.  Just  as  the 
conservatism  of  the  English-speaking  stock  makes 
it  highly  improbable  that  any  sweeping  change  in 
334 


THE   SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

our  spelling  will  ever  be  made,  so  the  enterprise 
of  the  English-speaking  stock,  its  energy  and  its 
common  sense,  make  it  highly  improbable  that 
any  system  will  long  endure  which  cramps  and 
confines  and  prevents  progress  and  simplification. 

Finally,  we  must  all  of  us  bend  our  energies 
to  combating  the  notion  that,  as  Mr.  Smith 
has  put  it,  "  the  existing  printed  form  is  not 
only  a  symbol  but  the  most  fitting  symbol  of 
our  mother-tongue."  There  is  an  almost  super- 
stitious veneration  felt  by  most  of  us  for  the 
spellings  we  learnt  at  school;  they  seem  to  us 
sanctified  by  antiquity;  and  perhaps  even  an  in- 
quiry into  the  history  of  the  language  is  not 
always  enough  to  disestablish  this  reverence  for 
false  gods.  Yet  knowledge  helps  to  free  us  from 
servitude  to  idols;  and  when  we  are  told  that  the 
so-called  "accepted  spelling"  has  "dignity, "we 
may  ask  ourselves  what  dignity  there  can  be  in 
the  spelling  of  harbour  with  an  inserted  u  which 
is  not  pronounced,  which  has  been  thrust  in  com- 
paratively recently,  and  which  is  etymologically 
misleading. 

In  his  effective  answer  to  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer's 
argument  against  the  metric  system,  President 
T.  C.  Mendenhall  remarked  that  "  ignorant  preju- 
dice "  is  not  so  dangerous  an  obstacle  to  human 
progress,  nor  as  common,  as  what  may  be  called 
"intelligent  prejudice,"  meaning  thereby  "an 

335 


THE  SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH  SPELLING 

obstinate  conservatism  which  makes  people  cling 
to  what  is  or  has  been,  merely  because  it  is  or 
has  been,  not  being  willing  to  take  the  trouble  to 
do  better,  because  already  doing  well,  all  the 
while  knowing  that  doing  better  is  not  only  the 
easier,  but  is  more  in  harmony  with  existing  con- 
ditions. Such  conservatism  is  highly  developed 
among  English-speaking  people  on  both  sides  of 
the  Atlantic."  It  is  just  such  conservatism  as  this 
that  those  of  us  will  have  to  overcome  who  wish 
to  see  our  English  orthography  continue  its  life- 
long efforts  toward  simplification. 

To  understand  how  unfortunate  for  the  cause 
of  progress  it  is  when  its  leaders  miscalculate 
the  popular  inertia  and  when  they  are  therefore 
moved  to  demand  more  than  seems  reasonable 
to  the  people  as  a  whole,  we  have  only  to  con- 
sider the  result  of  the  joint  action,  in  1883,  of  the 
Philological  Society  of  England  and  of  the  Ameri- 
can Philological  Association,  in  consequence  of 
which  certain  rules  were  prepared  to  simplify 
our  spelling.  Here  was  a  union  of  indisputable 
authorities  in  favor  of  an  amended  orthography; 
but  unfortunately  the  changes  suggested  were 
both  many  and  various.  They  were  too  various 
to  please  any  but  the  most  resolute  radicals; 
and  they  were  too  many  to  be  remembered 
readily  by  the  great  majority  of  every-day  folk 
taking  no  particular  interest  in  the  subject.  They 
336 


THE   SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

included  theater,  honor,  advertise,  catalog;  and 
had  they  not  included  anything  else,  or  had  they 
included  only  a  very  few  similar  simplifications, 
these  spellings  might  have  won  acceptance  in  the 
past  score  of  years,  even  in  Great  Britain ;  the  same 
authorities  would  now  be  in  a  position  to  make 
a  few  further  suggestions  equally  easy  to  re- 
member, with  a  fair  hope  that  these  would 
establish  themselves  in  turn. 

Owing  to  this  attempt  to  do  too  much  all  at 
once,  the  joint  action  of  the  two  great  philologi- 
cal organizations  came  to  naught.  Such  effect  as 
it  had  was  indirect  at  best.  It  may  have  been 
the  exciting  cause  of  the  so-called  "  Printers' 
Rules,"  which  were  approved  and  recommended 
by  many  of  the  leading  typographers  of  the 
United  States  a  few  years  later.  These  printers' 
rules  were  few  and  obvious.  They  suggested 
catalog,  program,  epaulet,  esthetic— a\\  of  which 
have  become  more  familiar  of  late.  They  sug- 
gested further  opposit,  hypocrit,  etc.,  and  also 
fotograf,  fonetic,  etc. ;  and  these  simplifications 
have  not  yet  been  adopted  widely  enough  to  pre- 
vent the  words  thus  emended  from  seeming  a 
little  strange  to  all  those  who  had  paid  no  spe- 
cial attention  to  the  subject.  And  these  un- 
interested outsiders  are  the  very  people  who  are 
to  be  converted.  To  them  and  to  them  only 
must  all  argument  be  addressed.  We  may  rest 
337 


THE   SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

assured  that  we  have  slight  chance  of  bringing 
over  to  our  side  any  of  those  who  have  actually 
enlisted  against  us.  We  must  not  count  on  de- 
sertions from  the  enemy;  we  must  enroll  the 
neutrals  at  every  opportunity. 

Probably  the  most  important  action  yet  taken 
in  regard  to  our  orthography  was  that  of  the 
National  Educational  Association  in  formally 
adopting  for  use  in  all  its  official  publications 
twelve  simplified  spellings— program,  tho,  altho, 
tboro,  tborofare,  thru,  tbruout,  catalog,  prolog, 
decalog,  demagog,  pedagog.  These  simplified 
spellings  were  immediately  adopted  in  the  '  Edu- 
cational Review '  and  in  other  periodicals  edited 
by  members  of  the  association.  They  are  very 
likely  to  appear  with  increasing  frequency  in  the 
school-books  which  members  may  hereafter  pre- 
pare; and  any  simplified  spelling  which  once  gets 
itself  into  a  school-book  is  pretty  sure  to  hold  its 
own  in  the  future.  After  an  interval  of  ten  or 
fifteen  years  the  National  Educational  Association 
will  be  in  a  position  to  consider  the  situation 
again;  and  it  may  then  decide  that  these  twelve 
words  have  established  themselves  in  their  new 
form  sufficiently  widely  and  firmly  to  make  it 
probable  that  the  association  could  put  forward 
another  list  of  a  dozen  more  simplified  spellings 
with  a  reasonable  certainty  that  those  also  will  be 
accepted. 

338 


THE  SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

The  United  States  government  appointed  a 
board  to  decide  on  a  uniform  orthography  for 
geographical  names;  and  the  recommendations 
of  this  body  were  generally  in  the  direction  of 
increased  simplicity— Bert ng  Straits,  for  example. 
The  spellings  thus  officially  adopted  by  the  na- 
tional government  were  at  once  accepted  by  the 
chief  publishers  of  school  text-books.  And  these 
makers  of  school-books  also  follow  the  rules 
formulated  by  a  committee  of  the  American  As- 
sociation for  the  Advancement  of  Science  ap- 
pointed to  bring  about  uniformity  in  the  spelling 
and  pronunciation  of  chemical  terms.  Among 
the  rules  formulated  by  the  committee  and 
adopted  by  the  association  were  two  which 
dropped  a  terminal  e  from  certain  chemical  terms 
entering  into  more  general  use.  Thus  the  men 
of  science  now  write  oxid,  iodid,  cblorid,  etc., 
and  quinin,  morphin,  anilin,  etc.,  altho  the  gen- 
eral public  has  not  relinquished  the  earlier  ortho- 
graphy, oxide  and  quinine.  Even  the  word 
toxin,  which  came  into  being  since  the  adoption 
of  these  rules  by  the  associated  scientists,  is 
sometimes  to  be  seen  in  newspapers  as  toxine. 

Thus  we  see  that  there  is  progress  all  along  the 
line;  it  may  seem  very  slow,  like  that  of  a  gla- 
cier, but  it  is  as  certain  as  it  is  irresistible.  There 
is  no  call  for  any  of  us  to  be  disheartened  by 
the  prospect.  We  may,  indeed,  each  of  us  do 
339 


THE  SIMPLIFICATION   OF   ENGLISH   SPELLING 

what  little  we  can  severally  toward  hastening  the 
result.  We  can  form  the  habit  of  using  in  our 
daily  writing  such  simplified  spellings  as  will  not 
seem  affected  or  freakish,  keeping  ourselves  al- 
ways in  the  forefront  of  the  movement,  but  never 
going  very  far  in  advance  of  the  main  body.  We 
must  not  make  a  fad  of  orthographic  ameliora- 
tion, nor  must  we  devote  to  it  a  disproportionate 
share  of  our  activity— since  we  know  that  there 
are  other  reforms  as  pressing  as  this  and  even 
more  important.  But  we  can  hold  ourselves 
ready  always  to  lend  a  hand  to  help  along  the 
cause;  and  we  can  show  our  willingness  always 
to  stand  up  and  be  counted  in  its  favor. 
(1898-1901) 


340 


XIV 

AMERICANISM-AN  ATTEMPT 
AT  A  DEFINITION 


AMERICANISM-AN   ATTEMPT 
AT  A  DEFINITION 

THERE  are  many  words  in  circulation  among 
us  which  we  understand  fairly  well,  which 
we  use  ourselves,  and  which  we  should,  how- 
ever, find  it  difficult  to  define.  I  think  that 
Americanism  is  one  of  these  words ;  and  I  think 
also  it  is  well  for  us  to  inquire  into  the  exact 
meaning  of  this  word,  which  is  often  most  care- 
lessly employed.  More  than  once  of  late  have  we 
heard  a  public  man  praised  for  his  "  aggressive 
Americanism,"  and  occasionally  we  have  seen  a 
man  of  letters  denounced  for  his  "  lack  of  Ameri- 
canism." Now  what  does  the  word  really  mean 
when  it  is  thus  used  ? 

It  means,  first  of  all,  a  love  for  this  country  of 
ours,  an  appreciation  of  the  institutions  of  this 
nation,  a  pride  in  the  history  of  this  people  to 
which  we  belong.  And  to  this  extent  Ameri- 
canism is  simply  another  word  for  patriotism. 
But  it  means  also,  I  think,  more  than  this:  it 
means  a  frank  acceptance  of  the  principles  which 
343 


AMERICANISM  — AN   ATTEMPT   AT   A   DEFINITION 

underlie  our  government  here  in  the  United 
States.  It  means,  therefore,  a  faith  in  our  fellow- 
man,  a  belief  in  liberty  and  in  equality.  It  im- 
plies, further,  so  it  seems  to  me,  a  confidence  in 
the  future  of  this  country,  a  confidence  in  its 
destiny,  a  buoyant  hopefulness  that  the  right 
will  surely  prevail. 

In  so  far  as  Americanism  is  merely  patriotism, 
it  is  a  very  good  thing.  The  man  who  does  not 
think  his  own  country  the  finest  in  the  world  is 
either  a  pretty  poor  sort  of  a  man  or  else  he  has 
a  pretty  poor  sort  of  a  country.  If  any  people 
have  not  patriotism  enough  to  make  them  willing 
to  die  that  the  nation  may  live,  then  that  people 
will  soon  be  pushed  aside  in  the  struggle  of  life, 
and  that  nation  will  be  trampled  upon  and 
crushed;  probably  it  will  be  conquered  and  ab- 
sorbed by  some  race  of  a  stronger  fiber  and  of  a 
sterner  stock.  Perhaps  it  is  difficult  to  declare 
precisely  which  is  the  more  pernicious  citizen  of 
a  republic  when  there  is  danger  of  war  with 
another  nation— the  man  who  wants  to  fight, 
right  or  wrong,  or  the  man  who  does  not  want 
to  fight,  right  or  wrong;  the  hot-headed  fellow 
who  would  plunge  the  country  into  a  deadly 
struggle  without  first  exhausting  every  possible 
chance  to  obtain  an  honorable  peace,  or  the  cold- 
blooded person  who  would  willingly  give  up 
anything  and  everything,  including  honor  itself, 
344 


AMERICANISM  — AN   ATTEMPT   AT   A    DEFINITION 

sooner  than  risk  the  loss  of  money  which  every 
war  surely  entails.  "  My  country,  right  or 
wrong,"  is  a  good  motto  only  when  we  add  to 
it,  "and  if  she  is  in  the  wrong,  I  '11  help  to  put 
her  in  the  right."  To  shrink  absolutely  from  a 
fight  where  honor  is  really  at  stake,  this  is  the 
act  of  a  coward.  To  rush  violently  into  a  quar- 
rel when  war  can  be  avoided  without  the  sacri- 
fice of  things  dearer  than  life,  this  is  the  act  of  a 
fool. 

True  patriotism  is  quiet,  simple,  dignified;  it 
is  not  blatant,  verbose,  vociferous.  The  noisy 
shriekers  who  go  about  with  a  chip  on  their 
shoulders  and  cry  aloud  for  war  upon  the  slight- 
est provocation  belong  to  the  class  contemptu- 
ously known  as  "Jingoes."  They  may  be  pa- 
triotic,—and  as  a  fact  they  often  are,— but  their 
patriotism  is  too  frothy,  too  hysteric,  too  unin- 
telligent, to  inspire  confidence.  True  patriotism 
is  not  swift  to  resent  an  insult;  on  the  contrary, 
it  is  slow  to  take  offense,  slow  to  believe  that  an 
insult  could  have  been  intended.  True  patriot- 
ism, believing  fully  in  the  honesty  of  its  own 
acts,  assumes  also  that  others  are  acting  with  the 
same  honesty.  True  patriotism,  having  a  solid 
pride  in  the  power  and  resources  of  our  country, 
doubts  always  the  likelihood  of  any  other  nation 
being  willing  carelessly  to  arouse  our  enmity. 

In  so  far,  therefore,  as  Americanism  is  merely 

345 


AMERICANISM  — AN   ATTEMPT   AT   A   DEFINITION 

patriotism  it  is  a  very  good  thing,  as  I  have  tried 
to  point  out.  But  Americanism  is  something 
more  than  patriotism.  It  calls  not  only  for  love  of 
our  common  country,  but  also  for  respect  for  our 
fellow-man.  It  implies  an  actual  acceptance  of 
equality  as  a  fact.  It  means  a  willingness  always 
to  act  on  the  theory,  not  that  "  I  'm  as  good  as  the 
other  man,"  but  that  "  the  other  man  is  as  good  as 
I  am."  It  means  leveling  up  rather  than  leveling 
down.  It  means  a  regard  for  law,  and  a  desire  to 
gain  our  wishes  and  to  advance  our  ideas  always 
decently  and  in  order,  and  with  deference  to  the 
wishes  and  the  ideas  of  others.  It  leads  a  man 
always  to  acknowledge  the  good  faith  of  those 
with  whom  he  is  contending,  whether  the  con- 
test is  one  of  sport  or  of  politics.  It  prevents  a 
man  from  declaring,  or  even  from  thinking,  that 
all  the  right  is  on  his  side,  and  that  all  the  hon- 
est people  in  the  country  are  necessarily  of  his 
opinion. 

And,  further,  it  seems  to  me  that  true  Ameri- 
canism has  faith  and  hope.  It  believes  that  the 
world  is  getting  better,  if  not  year  by  year,  at 
least  century  by  century;  and  it  believes  also  that 
in  this  steady  improvement  of  the  condition  of 
mankind  these  United  States  are  destined  to  do 
their  full  share.  It  holds  that,  bad  as  many 
things  may  seem  to  be  to-day,  they  were  worse 
yesterday,  and  they  will  be  better  to-morrow. 
346 


AMERICANISM  — AN   ATTEMPT   AT   A   DEFINITION 

However  dark  the  outlook  for  any  given  cause 
may  be  at  any  moment,  the  man  imbued  with 
the  true  spirit  of  Americanism  never  abandons 
hope  and  never  relaxes  effort;  he  feels  sure  that 
everything  comes  to  him  who  waits.  He  knows 
that  all  reforms  are  inevitable  in  the  long  run ; 
and  that  if  they  do  not  finally  establish  them- 
selves it  is  because  they  are  not  really  reforms, 
tho  for  a  time  they  may  have  seemed  to  be. 

And  a  knowledge  of  the  history  of  the  American 
people  will  supply  ample  reasons  for  this  faith 
in  the  future.  The  sin  of  negro-slavery  never 
seemed  to  be  more  secure  from  overthrow  than 
it  did  in  the  ten  years  before  it  was  finally  abol- 
ished. A  study  of  the  political  methods  of  the 
past  will  show  that  there  has  been  immense  im- 
provement in  many  respects;  and  it  is  perhaps  in 
our  political  methods  that  we  Americans  are  most 
open  to  censure.  That  there  was  no  deteriora- 
tion of  the  moral  stamina  of  the  whole  people 
during  the  first  century  of  the  American  republic 
any  student  can  make  sure  of  by  comparing  the 
spirit  which  animated  the  inhabitants  of  the 
thirteen  colonies  during  the  Revolution  with 
the  spirit  which  animated  the  population  of  the 
northern  states  (and  of  the  southern  no  less) 
during  the  civil  war.  We  are  accustomed  to  sing 
the  praises  of  our  grandfathers  who  won  our 
independence,  and  very  properly;  but  our  grand- 
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AMERICANISM  — AN   ATTEMPT   AT   A    DEFINITION 

children  will  have  also  to  sing  the  praises  of  our 
fathers  who  stood  up  against  one  another  for 
four  years  of  the  hardest  fighting  the  world  has 
ever  seen,  bearing  the  burdens  of  a  protracted 
struggle  with  an  uncomplaining  cheerfulness 
which  was  not  a  characteristic  of  the  earlier  war. 

True  Americanism  is  sturdy  but  modest.  It  is 
as  far  removed  from  "Jingoism"  in  times  of 
trouble  as  it  is  from  "  Spread-Eagleism  "  in  times 
of  peace.  It  is  neither  vainglorious  nor  boastful. 
It  knows  that  the  world  was  not  created  in  1492, 
and  that  July  4,  1776,  is  not  the  most  important 
date  in  the  whole  history  of  mankind.  It  does 
not  overestimate  the  contribution  which  America 
has  made  to  the  rest  of  the  world,  nor  does  it 
underestimate  this  contribution.  True  American- 
ism, as  I  have  said,  has  a  pride  in  the  past  of  this 
great  country  of  ours,  and  a  faith  in  the  future ; 
but  none  the  less  it  is  not  so  foolish  as  to  think 
that  all  is  perfection  on  this  side  of  the  Atlantic, 
and  that  all  is  imperfection  on  the  other  side. 

It  knows  that  some  things  are  better  here  than 
anywhere  else  in  the  world,  that  some  things  are 
no  better,  and  that  some  things  are  not  so  good 
in  America  as  they  are  in  Europe.  For  example, 
probably  the  institutions  of  the  nation  fit  the 
needs  of  the  population  with  less  friction  here  in 
the  United  States  than  in  any  other  country  in 
the  world.  But  probably,  also,  there  is  no  other 
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AMERICANISM  — AN   ATTEMPT   AT   A   DEFINITION 

one  of  the  great  nations  of  the  world  in  which 
the  government  of  the  large  cities  is  so  wasteful 
and  so  negligent. 

True  Americanism  recognizes  the  fact  that 
America  is  the  heir  of  the  ages,  and  that  it  is  for 
us  to  profit  as  best  we  can  by  the  experience  of 
Europe,  not  copying  servilely  what  has  been 
successful  in  the  old  world,  but  modifying 
what  we  borrow  in  accord  with  our  own  needs 
and  our  own  conditions.  It  knows,  and  it  has 
no  hesitation  in  declaring,  that  we  must  always 
be  the  judges  ourselves  as  to  whether  or  not  we 
shall  follow  the  example  of  Europe.  Many  times 
we  have  refused  to  walk  in  the  path  of  European 
precedent,  preferring  very  properly  to  blaze  out 
a  track  for  ourselves.  More  often  than  not  this 
independence  was  wise,  but  now  and  again  it 
was  unwise. 

Finally,  one  more  quality  of  true  Americanism 
must  be  pointed  out.  It  is  not  sectional.  It  does 
not  dislike  an  idea,  a  man,  or  a  political  party 
because  that  idea,  that  man,  or  that  party  comes 
from  a  certain  part  of  the  country.  It  permits  a 
man  to  have  a  healthy  pride  in  being  a  son  of 
Virginia,  a  citizen  of  New  York,  a  native  of  Mas- 
sachusetts, but  only  on  condition  that  he  has  a 
pride  still  stronger  that  he  is  an  American,  a  citi- 
zen of  the  United  States.  True  Americanism  is 
never  sectional.  It  knows  no  north  and  no 
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AMERICANISM  — AN   ATTEMPT   AT   A    DEFINITION 

south,  no  east  and  no  west.  And  as  it  has  no 
sectional  likes  and  dislikes,  so  it  has  no  interna- 
tional likes  and  dislikes.  It  never  puts  itself  in 
the  attitude  of  the  Englishman  who  said,  "  I  've 
no  prejudices,  thank  Heaven,  but  I  do  hate  a 
Frenchman!"  It  frowns  upon  all  appeals  to  the 
former  allegiance  of  naturalized  citizens  of  this 
country;  and  it  thinks  that  it  ought  to  be  enough 
for  any  man  to  be  an  American  without  the  aid 
of  the  hyphen  which  makes  him  a  British-Ameri- 
can, an  Irish-American,  or  a  German-American. 

True  Americanism,  to  conclude,  feels  that  a 
land  which  bred  Washington  and  Franklin  in  the 
last  century,  and  Emerson  and  Lincoln  in  this 
century,  and  which  opens  its  schools  wide  to  give 
every  boy  the  chance  to  model  himself  on  these 
great  men,  is  a  land  deserving  of  Lowell's  praise 
as  "  a  good  country  to  live  in,  a  good  country  to 
live  for,  and  a  good  country  to  die  for." 

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